How a Medieval Society Withstood Nearly 60 Years of Drought
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This paragraph seems to betray a deep misunderstanding of historical Chinese relations with steppe peoples to the north. This was the status quo. The Chinese empires more often than not tried to buy off the nomads with markets and the nominal tributary system. It was more often than not ruinously expensive and fraught with failure for the non-foreign Chinese empires to attempt to subjugate the steppes in the pre-gunpowder era; far cheaper to play them off against one another and create a buffer zone. This goes back more than 2000 years, to the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu, if not earlier.
That isn't incompatible with what the article says, though. Just because China wasn't actively going out and attacking the steppe peoples, doesn't mean that the steppe peoples weren't actively going out and raiding Chinese villages, souring China's relations with individual steppe tribes (even if China never mounted any punitive expeditions in response.)
The difference being proposed here, I think, is that the Uighurs actively sought to pacify and build trade relations with the Chinese Empire, and actively prevented their citizens from engaging in raiding across the Chinese border.
- The scientists involved used sensible precautions because they are pretty intelligent and have no interest in exposing themselves to dangerous pathogens.
- After the first sign of a dangerous outbreak the government gets involved and unlike movie governments they know what they're doing and soldiers will actually just sit in armored vehicles where the risk of zombie bites is minimal.
- It turns out brain tissue alone does not contain enough nutrients for a human-sized being to subsist for a significant amount of time and the outbreak naturally dies down after two days because the zombies run out of energy.
- In any case, Australia will be fine because zombies are not smart enough to pilot a plane or boat all the way there. If the outbreak starts there, the rest of the world is fine by the same logic.
Same thing how horror movies famously depend on the protagonists making the worst possible decisions ("let's split up!"). Zombie movies started off as societal critique about the dangers of consumerism. A realistic scenario does not make for an entertaining movie, and non-entertaining movies don't get funded.
Steven Soderbergh's Contagion also comes to mind as an example of a realistic, scientifically accurate depiction of an epidemic.
Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, while not being about zombies, is a very science/fact-based exploration of a hypothetical outbreak. A much less scary scenario, though; the pathogen only affects a single, isolated town which is quickly secured, and all of the action occurs in the experimental underground science lab where they study it. The 1971 film is also fantastic, and holds up really well.
There are other movies too, all designed to compel social change.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-giving-pledge-a-new-club-fo...
The movie has nothing to do with the book, except wasting the license.
- Scientists, especially early in an outbreak may not have the procedures down. For example, they will have to study specimens and take samples somehow. Where or how will they get the specimens? How will they put them into quarantine? If they need to be live specimens, this becomes even harder. How do they contain and sedate the specimens? I agree they will better than most movie scientists, but it's hardly a foregone conclusion that everything will safe and fine in perpetuity.
- I doubt this is true. There aren't enough armored vehicles for soldiers to be in one at all times. Plus mission parameters won't allow for that. For example, what if they need to secure a building? Also grunts are grunts, not hazmat experts. People will make mistakes.
Plus even if you're right about this, this say nothing about spreading through the orders-of-magnitude-large civilian population.
- I think you're arbitrarily mixing your zombie mythos. If it's a braaaaains type zombie it's a magical undead creature, and none of your scientific assumptions hold. If it's a virulent disease type zombie, then they can eat more than just human brains. And even if we imagine a scenario where the disease only lets them eat human brains, then it doesn't really matter since the wave of zombie outbreak will hit people regardless of whether the ones closer to ground zero are still alive or not. If they only survive for a couple days after turning, they are still successful if they spread to a new host before that happens.
- You're assuming the incubation period is short. If it starts out like a flu outbreak or something, people who are sick but don't know it yet can land on Australia.
Fight me!
AD 2. It's not just armored vehicles. It's also forming firing lines, using air support, and generally employing proper tactics instead of ending up in the middle of a Zombie horde.
AD 3. If we exclude Zombies-as-magic, the Zombies really need to eat something. I vaguely recall there was a movie that exploited this in a backstory, mentioning that the epidemic somewhere died down because Zombies starved to death.
AD 4. Yeah, that would be a worst-case scenario, though it would be easier to manage - if we assume the sickness spreads only through bodily fluids (bites), on the one hand you'd have sudden outbreaks everywhere, but on the other hand, you wouldn't be dealing with great hordes immediately turning your dying comrades into more Zombies.
28 days later
The show isn't about anything though, it's just a shitsack world¹ for the writers to stumble about aimlessly in.
I gave up on that show halfway through S3 because of the latter part. Shitsack world is fine. My problem with The Walking Dead is that the show lost any kind of sense after S1, and boils down to people doing nasty stuff to other people, without any goal or purpose. It's stories about people who just gave up.
My only complaint: "Zombie movies started off as societal critique about the dangers of consumerism"
The meaning of "Night of the Living Dead" (the film that defines where zombie movies started out, critically), is a much-debated topic, but "excessive consumerism" doesn't get much notice until at least a sequel or two later (forgive my memory), with the one that takes place in a mall.
The first/original was much less specific, much more philosophical, which makes it by far the most interesting (to humble 'ole me).
But the zombie genre tends to be based on the dynamics and interactions of actual humans. Romero's zombie movies are famed as social commentary, and you can (and people probably have) written entire graduate theses on what's going on in those films.
World War Z (the book, I haven't seen the film) explicitly has wealthy people using their resources to hide their infected status and spreading the infection as a result, some governments opting for tough-guy responses that make things worse but at least calm people down a bit, others deciding to protect favored racial/ethnic/economic groups while leaving disfavored ones out as literal bait, etc. etc.
That's mostly what the zombie genre is for, to comment on things like racism, economic inequality, etc. without risking the knee-jerk responses that would come from just explicitly saying "we live in a society that has these problems".
My thought was to use this as an advantage... Make beacons along the coastline to attract the horde. The target beacon would make random loud noises once per second. Within earshot of the target, beacon #2 would make loud noises once per hour. The next would be once per two hours, then four hours, etc. It'd corral them.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_plagues_in_Australia
Neither rabbits nor emus are really smart, as far as I know.
Note that introducing a virus that killed 95% of rabbits worked real well...but then the susceptible had been selected out of the population...
How to solve a zombie outbreak:
1. Board your windows and close your door.
2. Stand on your [balcony, garage, out your window], and [shoot/hit with a hard object] any zombies in your neighborhood.
3. Wait for it all to blow over.
Thats why all zombie movies skip over the actual outbreak.
There's also the question of what the zombies are serving as a metaphor for. Lumpenproletariat? Slave rebellions? Cold war era nuclear attack victims? Revenge of the colonized? And so on.