Aaaagh! Real Zombies!

Toga zombie is the worst!

  The zombie craze that has crept up on the world has displayed a large fanfare and with it discussion on the imminent zombie apocalypse. Everyone that has an inkling of interest in the genre has come up with their "zombie team," people that one would  enlist to help them survive in the aftermath of the zombie plague that destroys the world as we know it. I've been a zombie fan for years, since I first watched Romero's "Dead" series in high school (c. 2007 C.E.), So I may write a longer post than the usual due to personal bias.  

There zombies have shown up in every part of media from movies, games(board and video), books to even tv, and the mythos for zombies have changed over the years to accommodate trends in the public hysteria or the time.

The movie known for being the first film to center around zombies

Early Days: The idea of zombies have been around for a long time, generally being undead slaves to a powerful user of forbidden magic. Originating in Africa, zombies are first apparent in folklore where a person uses witchcraft to control another as a slave without will of its own, generally after being killed and revived. This takes its introductory form into North American culture with the 1932 film, "White Zombie." In it a voodoo priest runs amok with the protagonists love triangle with his ability to resurrect people as slaves.

The second sequel, and my favorite.

Modern Conception: The modern conception of the genre starts with the 1968 infamous horror movie, "Night Of The Living Dead," where zombies are transformed from mindless slaves to cannibalistic marauders. The premise is simple, the protagonist survivors must try to stay alive under an onslaught of graveyard ghouls that want to kill and eat them. There isn't really a formal reason why the dead come back to life other than the clues that are given; the zombies start rising after a satellite brings mysterious radiation from Venus back into the earth's atmosphere.
This type of 'radiation zombie' comes from the leftover hysteria over the successful atomic age horror movies, where the unknown and harmful effects of atomic radiation that transform natural things into horrible unnatural monsters.
This movie sets the standard for the zombie apocalypse genre, where the sheer numbers and ubiquity have started a quick breakdown of society into small pockets of degenerated survivors in a sea of zombie hostility. Its a genre that brings back the epic man versus nature (or in this case, un-nature?) conflict that has been successful in the past.

Shifting Origin: Since George A. Romero's "Dead" series, while the main concept has stayed the same, the cause of the zombie mayhem goes through a shift as people have become more knowledgeable to the facts of radiation poisoning."The Return Of The Living Dead," series during the 1990s, shifted the main culprit to the experimental chemical gas "2-4-5 Trioxin" that changes people into comical corpses that long for human brains. It invoked the fear of pollution and the effects on humans and the environment when the chemical saturates the cemetery ground as a pollutant in rainclouds.

This differs from the "Dead" series not only in the sense of a different back story, but also in the way zombies are spread throughout the world. When radiation turned people into zombies the population at large was already contaminated and one only needed to die to change into a zombie. "Return" started the trend in which a source of contamination spread the zombies in a plague-like fashion and is most common zombie storyline today. It is no longer just a fight to stay alive, but  also so as not to contract the zombie disease.

  Throughout all the zombie genre, zombies were naturally diseased and people that were bitten by them generally died soon after and turned into zombies and the rest of the group have to deal with the moral consequences of having to kill their friends and family. The difference here is that you don't have to be bitten by them to change into a zombie, only the original contaminate/disease that created them!

 The fear of epidemic is the more terrifying concept today because of the H1N1 and bird influenza scares that put people on edge, not mention the effects of the AIDS epidemic. The government has failed us before when AIDS first appeared on the scene, who's to say another horrible disease might show up and we won't know how to stop it before we are all wiped out?    

So could anything like that actually happen? Can people actually become zombies, rotting necrotic flesh not withstanding? Could an apocalyptic zombie world happen as well? We'll see what science has to say about that in my next post.
-'Till then, True Believers!(as Stan Lee would say)

P.S. - I've posted links to the Monster Island Resort podcast page because the host can explain the intricacies  of horror genre in a much more socially aware context than I could ever, so if you're confused about the link, just play the audio file posted on the MIR page.

Human-Cyborg Relations

As I promised, this post will be mostly about cyborgs.

    How far(or close?) are we to creating the 6 million dollar man? or the bionic woman?  A lot closer than tv and movies have told us.

More like the 60 million dollar man

    There have been successful 'bionic' prosthetics for humans for years and it appears to be getting better every year. The idea is that robotic muscles can be attached to the spinal cord or nerves and can thus be controlled by thinking about moving the limb. The technology is there, people that lose limbs now have the possibility of reviving lost functionality. Bionic limbs aren't even overly expensive as suggested in the Economist, although building a fully functional cyborg, would be a different story, the pentagon has been spending 50 million to 100 million dollars on bionic prototype research.

     
   A more obscure and significantly less practical science with the use of cyborg technology is the use human limbs on an actual robot. In theory it seems like it would be straightforward, much like the technique used in bionic limbs, a robot can just connect wires in a way that transmits a signal to the limb's nerve pathway and there it is! The human limb is now part of the collective. It would obviously be more intricate than that, but nothing a calculating computer mind couldn't overcome. Fortunately for us, this isn't as much of a reality as robots don't have the means to begin harvesting our body parts. It does, however, make a great scary antagonist in Star Trek.


 Thinking of the human body as a mechanical process brings to my mind one of my favorite short stories that I've read recently by the infamous H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator. The main theme of the story is about the conflict of modern scientific view of the human body versus the concept of the soul. In it the doctor Herbert West and his obedient assistant research the process of chemically bringing alive the recently dead.One of the more grisly experiments, which eventually led to the doctor's impending doom, was one in which he severed and revived separate limbs to prove that each limb can operate independently from the main body.      

You can hear an audio file of the tale here from my favorite podcast of all time, the Monster Island Resort, hosted by Miguel Rodriguez.

With this kind of segway, there can only be one kind of science to investigate in the next post. -'Till then!