Author notes

215 - Docking Report

El Cid

on May 10, 2018

Well, the captain got hers, so now it's back to work!

It's a subtle misrepresentation, but when Ethel says there are no security concerns at the docks… obviously from what's been going on, we know that isn't true. Ethel (the ship AI) has already been compromised by the same forces which hijacked Ula's brainware.

Also, you may have noticed in the background of panel three that the sunny sky outside the cabin windows ins rapidly going dark. It's all a simulation, of course, and it's shutting down as they prepare to leave.





How big of a threat would zombies be if they were real? Would they inevitably overrun the entire globe like in a George Romero movie, or would it be a relatively brief and easily containable local outbreak? Epidemiologists have models for predicting this type of thing, and the better ones can get pretty involved. I found a pretty neat little interactive zombie outbreak simulator that uses a version of the SIR (Susceptible – Infectious – Recovered) model to show how quickly a zombie epidemic would spread from a given point in the United States. Here's my 30 day zombie tracker for an outbreak starting here in Houston, Texas, where I live:



Of course, this is a super simplified model, where no infected people hop on a plane to New York City or go from zero to zombie during a cross country road trip, spreading the contagion faster. If the outbreak were really this slow, they'd probably just cordon off a quarantine zone and that would be the end of it.

But there's one problem I've seen with this and some of the other models that attempt to “scientifically” predict the outcome of a zombie outbreak. All of them assume a more or less infinite infectious period. The zombies don't die. When you model a disease that is contagious, incurable, and the infected never die, you're basically predetermining that your fantasy super virus will take over the world; it's only a question of how long will it take. But is an eternal infectious period a reasonable assumption?

Unless your zombies are controlled by voodoo or something supernatural like that, then they run on some kind of energy. For the sake of argument, let's ignore whether it makes sense for dead things to still be able to metabolize and somehow get the energy to their muscles to do zombie things (which, for the record, makes no sense at all). That means that, if the zombies aren't able to get food, they'll run out of energy to chase people with, and eventually die.

Scary though they may be, zombies are not a very efficient disease vector. After the initial zombie surge, I don't think they'd be very successful at infecting new people, and within a week the infected would be mostly dead or on their last legs. In epidemiological terms, we're describing a slow moving, non-airborne virus which runs its course from incubation to mortality over maybe a few days. Its spread rate would be nowhere near that of the flu; it would be more like a very aggressive form of rabies. Definitely not epidemic material IMO.