Something to think about ………not to forget the Prozac prodigies.
Is the Zombie Apocalypse possible?
Aside from the hand of God, most think the zombie apocalypse is not possible at all. I on the other hand never feel anything is outside the range of possibility. My personal belief is the collective consciousness of humanity, in conjunction with scientific realities is a very strong force to be reckoned with. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, or just bad luck, but the zombie apocalypse is more than possible. Let me tell you why…
Reactivating dead brain cells…
If you’ve seen one zombie movie, you know the most common thread throughout all zombie movies is the reactivation of dead brain cells, bringing a corpse to it’s feet to walk among the living. Theory being when a corpse’s brain gets reanimated, motor functions and the desire to eat is the only thing that remains producing the flesh-eating zombies you all know and love.
Reactivating dead brain cells sounds completely crazy right, and would never happen in a million years right? Incorrect. Over a decade ago, in an effort to treat patients’ with Alzheimer’s and Down’s Syndrome Jonathan Cooper successfully reactivated dead brain cells at Stanford University by infusing NGF (nerve growth factor) proteins directly into rodents. Now here’s where my inner tinfoil comes out. Reactivating dead brain cells is a big deal, and you’d assume such a monumental achievement would mean grants, more research, or tenoir right? After Cooper’s achievement in 2001 the research went dark, and Cooper became very hard to find. It kind of makes you wonder, did the research stop or did the research go off the books? Either way, not only is reactivating dead brain cells possible, but it has been achieved.
Viral outbreak…
In almost every zombie movie there’s obviously the zombie and their bite, which further spreads the disease turning its victim into one of the walking dead. How possible is it? Now that we know reactivating dead brain cells is possible, all we need to do is to dress up the reality with a viral strand that transfers through human body fluids (i.e. the saliva in a zombie’s bite). Before you comment below and tell me about Ebola Zombies in Monrovia, please know this is not what I’m talking about..
In the movie Quarantine Jennifer Carpenter plays the flirty news reporter who’s thrown into a hellish apartment complex where the tenants are infected with a highly evolved strain of rabies, making them go totally ape shit and kill everything living. But again, how possible is it? Rabies is a contagious and fatal viral disease of dogs and other mammals that causes madness and convulsions, transmissible through the saliva to humans. Rabies is continuously evolving and if you track the epidemiology and various mutations of rabies, you can easily see this virus is trying to make it up the food chain to a host that will spread the virus more efficiently i.e. human. Were such a strain ever to make it to the human population, the strain would need to stop killing its hosts so fast, a problem it’s been having as of late seeing how we still have no cure for it. While this may not be the zombie apocalypse you had in mind, it’s one of the most similar and realistic zombie apocalypse scenarios you could face.
Agent Z…
We all know about Agent Orange, but what about Agent Z? Even after the U.S. bioweapons division officially shut down circa 1969, our government still ‘unofficially’continued to test, and even produce more lethal toxins like anthrax and botulism. While neither of these qualify as undead agents, what I’m concerned with is what we don’t know.
The government has always had a fascination with mind control (go figure), such as MK Ultra that provided a foundation of research for the CIA’s (central intelligence agency)current interrogation methods. Not only that, but the government has a bad rep for testing its biological toys on unsuspecting service members and civilians. Back in ‘66 the US Army even released various strains of bacteria into the Chicago and New York water systems to test our ‘vulnerability to biological attacks’..
So the question has to be asked, what happens when they go too far? What happens when US Bioweapons or CDC create a biological agent or toxin that causes psychosis throughout an entire population? Agent Z could be a federally hosted mashup of genetically supercharged bacteria that pushes an entire city to cannibalize itself, or not. Who knows, but I’m old enough not to put anything past the government.
Disease…
When thinking about the zombie apocalypse you rarely consider disease as the catalyst, even though parasites have their merits. Whether it’s a parasite or a protein, both have the potential to turn humans into raging lunatics. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy or ‘Mad Cow Disease’ in humans is calledCreutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) and is eerily similar to the same symptoms the undead would exhibit. The infectious proteins that cause vCJD do not independently evolve as aggressively as viral strains, and it takes a year to produce the worse symptoms (myoclonic jerk, dementia, impaired thinking, insomnia) so don’t take cow brains off your dinner menu just yet.
If vCJD doesn’t blow your skirt up how about toxoplasma gondii? Toxoplasma gondii is a single celled parasite that already infects over sixty million people throughout the world. Don’t freak out just yet, as it currently stands the parasitic protozoan hasn’t mutated into an aggressive disease just yet, and is still very treatable. The only thing that gets this parasite on the list is its infection rate and its ability to cause severe brain damage in‘worse case scenarios’…
Ready to nail your windows shut?
If you are use screws not nails, genius. However, you can hold off on sealing yourself away from the world just yet. As you can see every single possibility we listed simply provides the parameters needs for a zombie apocalypse, but any one element by itself in its current state will not bring about the end of all life as we know it. Sure, with a mutation here, an aggressive strain there, and a little help from nature’s biggest masochist we could see something similar to a zombie apocalypse. We know some of you secretly want the end to come but unfortunately guys you’re going to have to wait, keeping your bunker full, and your ear to the ground…
https://uscrow.org/2015/08/11/when-will-the-zombie-apocalypse-happen/
There is already zombies walking around. Have you ever noticed anybody with an iphone texting? Todays youth without an iphone, they would be walking around in a daze bumping into walls if the net went down.
Hahaha! No kidding. I see it all the time at work. All of the high school and college kids can’t stand to be away from their phones for more than 5 minutes. It’s like a drug. They don’t know how to communicate without it. The breakroom becomes a texting and social networking room, rather than a place to talk to your buddies about work and life off the clock. If you take the damn thing away from them, they’ll go crazy like a bunch of rabid dogs.
Agreed REDHORSE, if the internet went down for a week, there would be some roaming around seeing things they never noticed before, like trees and plants, the Earth and sky, and the sun. FEMA would have to dispatch crisis counselors. 😆
Comparing the reactivation of dead brain cells in a living organism to reactivation of dead brain cells in a corpse is a bit of a jump.
You want to reactivate your dead brain cells? Researchers at the University of Florida have discovered that the Psilocybin mushrooms repair damaged brain cells and actually grow new ones.
They remain illegal so Big Pharma can make a drug from them that also causes side effects that will require additional medical treatment.