Okay kids, if you haven't read any Therumancer posts recently read this one:
I think the idea of a zombie outbreak is possible but not likely compared to many other things. I would not look towards a scientific cause for a lot of reasons, but an occult one. I'm not a deeply spiritual or superstitious person, but there is plenty of wierd stuff out there. Even scientists and people well grounded in reason have tendencies not to push their luck, and for all the "Reason" inherant in society there ARE laws preventing realtors from not informing people about houses with "a history" before buying them, and you'll notice most buildings do not have a 13th floor marked. Not to mention the fact that paranormal investigation shows are currently 'hip' and while they don't find much that is over the top, they do run into some wierd stuff.
A lot of religions include dead walking the earth as well, either as part of a specific event, or as a key element of the religion somehow. So basically unless your a total atheist there is a good chance your faith might include something providing for the possility as well. If any religion turns out to be correct, there is a pretty good chance it might involve something that could result in a zombie apocolypse or whatever.
So basically, it's not something I worry about, or suggest preparing for, but I suppose in the end it wouldn't totally shock me if it happened. I'm mostly a creature of reason but try and keep an open mind. I don't think there is anything incredible or supenatual out there in great numbers (the world is too boring as we all know), but on a lot of levels I hope I'm wrong.
As far as a zombie "apocolypse" goes, I'm not sure how apogolyptic it would be. Assuming that for whatever reason it went down similarly to the movies, irregardless of the cause, the biggest problem is of course going to be the initial apperance, outbreak, curse, or divine action that transforms the population and the people who die in the initial wave. After that I think it would get progressively easier to survive and deal with the problem and go downhill for the zombies, barring some kind of additional factors.
Even the best Zombie movies are contingent on a lot of bad assumptions. Like the idiot who lets the zombies into a fortified area, won't acknowlege a loved one is infected, or my personal favorite the old lady who let the zombies into the mall while trying to save her annoying furball dog in the video game "Dead Rising". Basically it seems oftentimes half the criseses in movies and such that make them exciting are contrived, simply because watching a bunch of people sit around read, books, play video games, and drink beer while keeping weapons nearby would get boring (and really that's pretty much what it would be like for a lot of people, a lot of time simply existing.... )
Oftentimes people decide to go on very profoundly about "What would you do if there were suddenly no grocery stores to get food in?" and stuff like that. Granted like most people I don't know much about farming or archaic crafts or whatever. On the other hand I don't nessicarly think things like that would be quite as nessicary as many people might think. For starters all of the stuff sitting around out there isn't going anywhere. Most Zombie Apocolypse scenarios involve people moving down empty streets, and finding all the stores and supplied areas empty, even if they had just woken up a few hours ago and watched their equally surprised next door neighbor get eaten or whatever. The bottom line is that if almost everyone is suddenly a Zombie, nobody would be looking this stuff. If people were grabbing the stuff and then getting killed or turning zombie, a lot of places wouldn't be empty, they would have stuff in them. The point here is that it just evaporates. What's more if there are enough survivors to strip supermarkets as well as entire towns, then were aren't going to be dealing with quite as big a population reduction as the genere generally applies, and it beggers disbelief to assume in any way shape or form that ALL of those people are going to be relatively useless in a pinch. The bigger the group, th emore specialist skills and such your going to find. Especially in the US where we have people with degrees and years of work experience who can wind up homeless on the street. Basically in most first world countries everyone is overeducated, and comparing education systems oftentimes becomes a P@ssing contest of the most extreme sort. The bottom line is that it's rare to find a person who is going to be totally useless in any situation, and frankly people DO learn things as time progresses and teach each other especially in crisis situations.
This also brings up the whole point that zombies are by definition not limitless. Contrary to Zombie movies, I am not buying that you could blow away a few hundred zombies in an area and see no signifigant reduction. There are only so many people around any given place, and just as humans are not infinite in number, neither would zombies be. Even in a major city you'd be surprised how empty an area would get if you whacked like 200 dudes. Plus even if all the zombies came running that would mean they would no longer be in the areas they started in emptying out those areas.
One of the dumbest things I saw in a Zombie movie was in the "Day Of The Dead" remake (I think that was the right one) where you had a dude in a guns and ammo shop who is an expert marksman picking up zombies all day and not making any differance in the horde. His big problem was a food crisis, but no offense if you sit around and drop a few thousand bodies in pretty much any town/city out there your going to start running out of people. 50,000 people is a pretty decent csized community and if I sat around and took down 5,000 of them that would be 10% of the entire bloody population of everyone for miles around. As crowded as malls and the area around them might seem, I would think I'd have depopulated the region long before that.
The point of this being that in addition to hiding, or making supply "runs" people could very well clear entire areas, something you rarely see happen. People act like these scenarios work like video games (perpaps why there are so many zombie video games oddly) where as soon as you kill one, another one "spawns". Realistically though that isn't the way how things would work.
So in short, I suppose it's no less likely than many other mass crisis situations. However in a realistic sense I don't think it would actually be an end of humanity unless it happened in combination with other things. Like say a deity deciding a Zombie uprising is simply the warm up act for the real "fun".
For those that read this far, if I was to ever make a zombie movie of my own I'd probably use some kind of massive occult ritual. Some Satanists or "Black" Voodoo guys or whatever doing a ritual to give the earth to the dead or something, and maybe even being surprised when it works. I think occult zombies are scarier, and some kind of massive curse is a better reason for having people drop dead and come back than a virus since anything as well understood as an infection can cause a lot of "yeah buts" when people who know about it analyze the facts.
What's more as much as a "headshot" taking a zombie down is a classic, I've always sort of felt that if you want to make things desperate it's far better to have super durable zombies who need to be hacked to pieces (similar to what they did in the Demons movies, or Evil Dead, albeit in this case with them being undead as opposed to possesed or whatever). Not only because they become more credible without a fairly exploitable weakness, but because I've always wanted to see a movie where some genere savvy dude calmly makes a headshot only to find that the head is totally extraneous to the functioning of the zombie and probably the most pointless place to shoot one as at best you just get a headless thing that is still trying to kill you.
All of that has more or less been done, but still that's the way *I* would develop it.
