For some reason, the concept of the zombie fascinates mankind . This attraction has garnered considerable momentum, especially in the last decade with TV series such as The Walking Dead and films such as 28 Days Later or World War Z.
How did the idea of zombies start?
The word zombie is believed to derive from the word Kongo nzamb i, which means “spirit of a dead person.” For the most part, the stories about the undead were relegated to Haiti, but soon became more popular with the first film ‘White Zombie’ -The Legion of the Soulless Dead- (1932) and finally the cult classic ‘The night of the living deaths’ (1968).
Could a zombie actually exist?
In fiction, slowly but relentlessly, the zombies end up trapping anyone who can breathe, making up for their lack of speed with relentless patience and overwhelming numbers of limbs.
Zombies are a physical paradox. They are undead, but they move as if they were alive. They are cold and lifeless, but somehow they break skulls to unearth a treasure trove of brains. They rot, but they catch the most unfortunate in their chaotic journey. However, according to our current understanding of human biology, zombies simply cannot exist.
Earth’s climate
Earth’s unforgiving climate would affect zombies in many ways. The high heat and humidity accelerate the deterioration of rotten meat by providing the perfect conditions for the proliferation of insects and bacteria, which break down everything where their enzymes are established. The dry heat of a desert would also suck out the zombies in a matter of hours.
Deep winter would make zombie bones more brittle than they already are. Even the slightest bump or stumble could cause their skeletons to completely collapse, perhaps even under their own weight.
Not to mention the deterioration caused by the sun’s ultraviolet rays, hurricane-force winds, rain, and hail (perhaps this bad weather is one of the reasons why so many zombies prefer the relative safety of an abandoned basement or jail).
Regarding locomotion, in humans it is possible thanks to the links between muscles, tendons, skeletal elements and others. When part of that system fails, we hardly move, if at all, hence it was impossible for zombies to move or even wobble.
Considering the lack of a brain , the human central nervous system controls all of our muscle activity by firing electrical signals from the brain to muscle cells, which contract in response to gray matter commands. Many zombies appear to suffer massive head injuries that could cause the brain to not fully function, making the idea of walking even more implausible.
As if this weren’t enough, viruses, fungi, bacteria, and other microscopic invaders have undermined humanity since the beginning of time. However, our immune system, brimming with the armament of white blood cells, keeps us alive. However, this is not the case for zombies: they are a perfect breeding ground for untold numbers of bacteria, fungi and viruses that would quickly shorten the life of their hosts, devouring them from the inside out.
We would find even more reasons why it is impossible for zombies to survive so many vicissitudes.
Zombie lovers tend to have a romantic vision of what life would be like once the apocalypse hit us (we would not have to go to school or work), but probably the most worrisome of all would be the lack of medicine, gasoline / fuel and clean water. So everything better stay as it is.
