Poll: Could a zombie APOCALYPSE actually occur?

[hazabaza1]

If it's spread from bodily fluids and the such? No chance. Military would gear up and take out the threat before it escalates, I'm guessing.
If it was like, Walking Dead infection

Spoiler

we're all infected and all it takes to turn it dying

then it'd be more likely. I guess eventually shit would go down.

 

[Major_Tom]

I think Resident Evil got it right. Even with all the BOWs and "natural" animal and plant mutants, the virus never got out of the Raccoon City (Sheena Island and Rockfort Island were separate outbreaks).

 

[Robetid]

If there is too much room in Hell and the dead walk the earth then yes, I guess it can happen coz that would make it biblical and too much weird shit happens when it comes to that stuff, implying that stuff happened. If its government issued then i guess it could get out of control. If its anything else i don't see it happening.

 

[Ambitiousmould]

Imagining there is form form or rabies or something, the symptoms of which make people behave like zombies, then this is my answer:
It depends on where it starts. if it starts somewhere poor and remote, like some African village or something, then it would take longer for it to spread, but it would probably have very little in the way of interruption due to the news not getting out quickly and resources to form a military quarantine being low,and the disease could spread around, but then again, travelling for the zombies would be damn near impossible, and if it did get out of hand then the borders of that place could be closed anyway.

But if it starts in a 1st world, highly populated area, then - although it would spread quickly - a quarantine is very likely, and the military could just bring in helicopters and tanks, even just very light armoured vehicles to deal with the problem in a way which renders zombies completey useless. have you tried chewing through a tank? I imagine it to kind of be like Shaun Of The Dead, when the army just turns up and wins. In games/films/TV shows when you see abandoned tanks in the middle of the road, I just think, "no, how did that tank crew even die?"

Sooooo... no.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Depend how obvious the zombie 'disease' (parasite, virus, whatever) is when caught. If it's dormant for a long time, it could get into different countries before anyone knew what was happening. If there were side effects like vomiting and nausea, and didn't spread very quickly, I doubt it would get far in a first-world country. We've had things like the Hendra virus and bird flu happen in living memory, and I haven't gotten either. It would have to be an uncommonly stealthy disease. But if people degenerate into mindless beasts immediately, the whole thing would go to shit because even if every military an civil measure failed, the absolute worst you would get is everywhere reachable by land overrun, because none of them would have the coordination to use a vehicle. And I'm in Australia, so...yeah. The worst we get is a civil war from all the overcrowding, or maybe the rest of the world is lucky and it originates and stays here.

Basically, yes, as long as it is better than any other disease in recent history at avoiding scrutiny.

 

[Knight Captain Kerr]

The Walking Dead and Romero films have the same zombies. Nobody really knows for certain why but everyone who dies in a way that the brain isn't destroyed comes back as a zombie.

Anyway my answer is maybe.

 

[The White Hunter]

Some kind of fungus could adapt very slowly over millions of years maybe but it's unlikely.

Also I'm pretty sure with nukes and shit we could contain such a thing. Y'know, irradiate that shit and purge the infection.

 

[Bepo_Bear]

The only way I see something close to that happening is a company makes a new diet pill that speeds up your daily metabolism to the point were standing still is as good as a run
and walking is like a triathlon (How you ask ......... Science that how ) its reasonably priced and easy to get for the average man or woman so business booms, but people get careless and start taking to many to increase the effect which starts to leave lingering effects in the body the more people take, it starts working to well peoples bodies constantly burning of more of there energy then they can take in, people are hungry all the time with no possible way to quench or stop there hunger, food starts to run out as animals and factories are pushed to there limits trying to make food for an ever starving population, soon there bodies start to waste and eat themselves becoming thin husks that are looking for
anything to eat, it's an epidemic of hundreds of millions of people unable to eat or find food, soon one person is so hungry he attacks another person to try and eat, eating because he has to not because he wants to, the taste is good enough so more and more of the drug riddled starvers start to attack those who haven't taken the drug, soon mass announcements of country wide cannibalism and killing start to spread, people killing people for food and flesh, running riot in the streets in a drug fueled hunger that cannot be helped or stopped eating everything be it human, plant or animal, devouring the world around them, and so humanity must survive

not really an answer to the question but I just wanted to way in with my crappy pseudo sci-fi nonsense on zombie ideas, I have much more to add on but I think that is enough of a start for me to get mocked XD

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

Also I'm pretty sure with nukes and shit we could contain such a thing. Y'know, irradiate that shit and purge the infection.

What if the virus infects cockroaches? Not even nukes could stop it then

Anyway I don't think a zombie apocalypse would actually work unless civilisation had already broken down to such an extent where we had no organised force to stop the threat before it escalated.

 

[The White Hunter]

Also I'm pretty sure with nukes and shit we could contain such a thing. Y'know, irradiate that shit and purge the infection.

What if the virus infects cockroaches? Not even nukes could stop it then

Anyway I don't think a zombie apocalypse would actually work unless civilisation had already broken down to such an extent where we had no organised force to stop the threat before it escalated.

I'm pretty sure that cockroaches don't do to well in horribly irradiated environments. The bomb itself might not kill them but the resulting irradiation of the area for hundreds of miles will cook everything from the inside out.

A bit like a giant microwave.

At any rate I'm pretty sure the zombies would be fucked by the environment and wild animals in most situations, assuming that is that the virus prays only on humans and isn't a Resident Evil virus that works of god damn T-rexes.

At any rate the realistic likely hood of a zombie apocalypse is low. Zombie infection - possible, it ending the world? Fuck no, slowly shambling undead, meet helicopter gunships. They can't bite you when you blow them into little meat chunks.

Makes for fun fantasy though. Remember: aim for the chest, it's easier to hit and shattering it's spine will stop it anyway.

 

[Naeras]

Even disregarding the fact that humans generally are pretty apt at killing stuff, especially slow-moving corpses, the max lifespan(deathspan?) of a zombie would be a couple of days without a functioning immune system. After that, fungi and bacteria would break down the body to the point where it wouldn't be capable of walking around anymore.

Also, the enzymes and proteins that enable movement and such require a steady temperature. Any lower than body temperature in the air, and the zombies wouldn't be able to move unless they were capable of regulating body temperature(in which case they're not dead). If it's sub-zero, the frost would even cause the zombies' cells to burst.

So no, a zombie apocalypse where people get killed by all the zombies just can't happen. It could theoretically be a result of a virus or something like that, but then I'd be afraid of the virus, not the zombies.
Unless it's the Crysalids from XCom that were the cause of the zombies. In which case I wouldn't be scared; I would be fucking terrified.

 

[Do4600]

Unlikely, but if zombies ever exist and can spread as they do in movies and games they could take over the earth. The chance that a microbe evolves in a such a way to make a human zombie is practically non-existant. The nature of disease is that it interferes with the bodies normal function, so a disease that makes people basically violently insane will almost always leave them crippled or comatose, a zombie disease would have to be very selective, and that means that it would have to be either designed or have a geological amount of time to evolve.