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Zombie Survival. Your Fantasy is a DELUSION
Zombie Survival. Your Fantasy is a DELUSION
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Phụ đề (216)
0:00
Nobody is more ready for the zombie apocalypse than this guy. He’s got Berettas on his belt,
0:05
side, and ankles - plus a Mossberg shotgun, a Steyr TMP, and an AK-47 slung across his
0:11
back. He’s got hundreds of rounds in his backpack. And he can fire all day.
0:16
Right up until he gets cornered by a horde
0:18
of zombies and realizes he picked the absolute worst time to reload…
0:22
This is everything people get wrong about zombie apocalypses.
0:26
15:
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We’ve all had the apocalypse fantasy: Mowing through waves of groaning Z’s with our modified
0:32
set of wheels, maybe even a battering ram on the grille. But we’re sorry to burst your Mad
0:36
Max bubble - driving wouldn’t be practical for long in a zombie apocalypse scenario.
0:40
And that fantasy dies fast - because fuel dies faster.
0:44
Even if your vehicle gets amazing mileage, you’ll still need gas eventually. And without
0:48
the daily refueling trucks that keep stations stocked, those underground tanks run dry fast.
0:54
So in the short term, your ‘wasteland ride” is going to be empty with nowhere to fill up.
0:59
And things get even worse.
1:00
Gasoline has a shelf life. Sitting in the engine of an inert car, you can expect it to stay good
1:05
for about a few months. In a jerry can under ideal conditions, you’re still only looking at 6 months,
1:10
at best. So soon enough, everyone is gonna be going at it on foot, or dusting off their old BMX.
1:16
But even if you were sitting on top of an oil refinery when the dead began to rise, it probably
1:21
still wouldn’t do you much good. With everyone fleeing the cities and abandoning cars the second
1:25
the hordes show up, most major highways would turn into solid parking lots. Traveling by vehicle
1:30
would be a massive pain - and it’d trigger a whole chain of other problems we’ll get to later.
1:35
And once everyone’s stuck on foot, the world doesn’t just get dangerous. It gets disgusting…
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14:
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Your average American throws out 4.9 pounds (2.2 kg) of trash per day - that’s almost
1:46
1,800 pounds (816 kg) per person every year. You’re protected from the worst of this by
1:51
the tireless efforts of garbage men every single day. But in a zombie apocalypse,
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nobody’s coming to collect the trash. Sure, there’d be slightly less trash - zombies don’t
2:00
generate much food waste and they’re not exactly big on single-use plastics - but
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for the survivors, the streets would still be absolutely buried in junk and debris.
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But the trash is just the opening act.
2:11
When the power grid goes out - more on that later - you’ll be seeing fridges and freezers
2:15
across the nation fail. Not only would this mean rotting and festering food in every American home,
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it’d also mean that all supermarkets would quickly become revolting biohazards.
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You’d also see some revolting problems bubble up from below. In a zombie apocalypse,
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people are too busy running from the Walking Dead to continue their jobs in
2:33
sewer line maintenance. The resulting strain on this system would turn an
2:36
apocalypse into an Apoo-calypse, adding a lovely fecal perfume to the stench of
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rotting corpses… and the eye-watering BO of people who haven’t showered in weeks.
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And if you think that smells bad, wait until the modern world shuts off completely.
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13: You don’t see this much in zombie movies or games,
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but in real life, you’d lose everything within days of the dead rising en masse.
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That’s because the power grid can fail in a huge variety of ways - even when the professionals
3:03
tasked with maintaining it aren’t drooling for the brains of their former co-workers.
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And once it inevitably goes down, there’s realistically no one left to turn it back on.
3:12
So unless you’re in a fortified base with solar power and the ability to fix it when it breaks,
3:17
get used to reading by candlelight. No movies. No games. No phones. No streetlights.
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And the moment the lights go out, you’re not
3:24
just fighting zombies anymore. You’re fighting your own body.
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12:
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Whether it’s the soldiers and the Jimmies from the 28 Days Later franchise, Negan and the
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Governor in The Walking Dead, or the cannibals in The Last of Us - there’s always some pack of
3:38
cultists and warlords ready to prove that classic zombie cliche: the humans are the real monsters.
3:44
But it turns out, all the would-be warlords would probably end up being zombie food while normal
3:48
people cooperate and help each other. Humans are social animals, and major studies from both
3:53
Harvard and Yale show that people tend to help each other in the midst of crisis. Psychologists
3:57
have also found that tragedy often leads to unity among those affected. Scott T. Allison,
4:02
Professor of Psychology at the University of Richmond, has argued that chaotic nightmare
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scenarios actually create the perfect conditions for ordinary people to step up and become leaders.
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But don’t get too optimistic. Because once society collapses
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even a tiny injury can turn into a death sentence.
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11:
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We’ll get onto the nature of the zombie virus itself soon, but it’s more mundane diseases,
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viruses, and infections that will be likely to cause you trouble during a zombie apocalypse.
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Clearly, the American healthcare system isn’t great as is, but in the post-apocalypse,
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you won’t be able to find a doctor or access to over the counter medicine if you get sick.
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Getting bitten by a zombie is one thing, but what if you sprain your ankle? There’s
4:40
nothing guaranteeing you’ll be able to find painkillers. Or worse, what if you get a wound
4:45
that actually breaks the skin? Unless you can properly bind and disinfect the wound,
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you’re at risk of infection, and that infection can very easily become fatal.
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During the US Civil War - one of the most violent periods in American history - roughly
4:58
two out of every three deaths came from disease, not bullets. And in a
5:02
zombie-infested world with no hospitals, that’s the rulebook we’re playing by now.
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But it’s not just disease, it’s also a matter of nutrition.
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If you’re a subsistence hunter who already lives off the land, this part doesn’t apply
5:14
to you. But for the rest of us that only hunt our food through the aisles of supermarkets or in the
5:18
Mickey D’s drive thru, the zombie apocalypse is gonna be tough. As we’ve already established,
5:23
supermarkets would very quickly become rotten, vermin-infested hellscapes, and when
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our supplies of tinned goods run out, it’s time to look for our meat and vegetables elsewhere.
5:31
And yes, you’re going to need to eat your vegetables in the apocalypse. If you’ve got
5:35
that solar-powered fort we mentioned earlier, you might be able to grow crops… assuming you
5:40
actually have the know-how and gear - which is a pretty big ‘if.’ But if you’re a wandering
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wasteland nomad who doesn’t want to die of scurvy, you’d better start learning which
5:48
wild plants are safe to eat. Because the only thing more embarrassing than getting
5:51
eaten by zombies… is getting eaten by zombies while you’ve got mushroom-induced diarrhea.
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And if you think that’s bleak, wait until you
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realize zombie infection is the easy version of disease.
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10:
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In most zombie movies and games, the virus spreads through bites or other bodily fluids,
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has an incubation period anywhere from seconds to a few days. Once you turn,
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you immediately go hunting healthy people to keep the infection rolling.
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As disease setups go, that’s not actually that bad.
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Real life doesn’t need bites to ruin you - from measles to flu to norovirus to tuberculosis,
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plenty of them have traits that the zombie virus don’t. For example, they create fomites,
6:30
objects or surfaces where the virus can linger and infect others. But even worse, the pathogens go
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airborne - spreading in tiny, invisible particles through coughs and sneezes - during an incubation
6:40
period where neither the infected nor the newly infected even knows they’re sick yet.
6:45
Or let’s even take another disease spread directly through bodily fluids,
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like HIV. It’s so feared because it can incubate for years - meaning someone might stay sexually
6:54
active and pass it on long before they show any obvious symptoms. By comparison, the symptoms
6:59
of turning into a zombie are always extremely noticeable, so the uninfected keep their distance.
7:04
For another point of comparison, take Ebola, a dangerous virus that’s killed thousands in
7:09
West Africa and is a favorite of tabloid fearmongers. But it never blossomed into
7:14
the next global pandemic, mainly because its symptoms are extremely obvious,
7:18
and it usually spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids - something most people can avoid.
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With zombies, dodging a growling nightmare monster trying to bite
7:26
your face off is honestly way easier than avoiding an invisible airborne
7:30
infection from the guy coughing 2 feet (0.6 meters) away on your morning commute.
7:33
But don’t relax yet. Because even if zombies aren’t realistically contagious,
7:37
the apocalypse itself is.
7:39
9:
7:40
In the US, natural disasters kill from 40,000 to 50,000 Americans per year, between floods,
7:46
droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and fires. And that’s with local authorities,
7:52
advanced warning systems, and relief efforts of organizations like FEMA
7:55
and the Red Cross - none of which would be in play after the zombie apocalypse.
7:59
The result would be the natural disasters that are already causing us horrific loss of life,
8:04
and are trending in a worse direction thanks to climate change. It would be even more ruinous in
8:09
the zombie apocalypse. You’d likely be looking at hundreds of thousands
8:12
of deaths from natural disasters alone each year, at a conservative estimate.
8:17
And somehow, that’s still not the scariest part.
8:20
8:
8:21
You might think that one of the few fringe benefits of society collapsing
8:24
from the zombie horde would be no longer needing to fill in a W2 and figure out
8:29
whether your zombie-murdering hammer is a valid tax-deductible expense. But we have
8:33
pretty good reasons to believe that the Tax Man would still be wandering the wasteland,
8:37
ready to audit the hell out of you if he suspects you’ve been hiding your bottlecaps.
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This isn’t just Sovereign Citizen Paranoia here, either.
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Since the Cold War, the IRS has put a plan in place to ensure that collection could
8:49
resume as quickly as twelve hours after the events of a nuclear war. And trust
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us when we say a nuclear war would be a lot worse than zombies roaming the streets. So,
8:58
you better hope that somehow, H&R Block and TurboTax have survived the zombie menace, too.
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And if that didn’t ruin your day enough, here’s the part zombie games can’t simulate.
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7:
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Resident Evil, The Last of Us, Dead Rising, DayZ,
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even the gloriously cheesy House of the Dead. There’s no denying that playing a
9:16
zombie-killing video game is fun. And what could be more satisfying than scoring a gloriously
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meaty headshot against a Zom that thought it was gonna turn you into its midnight snack?
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This is where the sobering dose of reality comes in.
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During a real zombie apocalypse scenario, the undead or infected
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you’re putting to rest wouldn’t be a selection of procedurally generated zombie character models.
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They’ll be your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers, maybe even your family,
9:41
if you’re really unlucky. So while it’s fun to be an ace zombie killer in the world of video games,
9:46
in real life, you could expect a heaping dose of PTSD to go along with every notch on your belt.
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And that’s not the only way the apocalypse would mess with your head.
9:54
6:
9:55
Conspiracy theorists would have a field day. Maybe you’d say:
9:59
“But videos of zombies attacking and feasting on people in the streets would be undeniable!”
10:04
And that’s just flat-out wrong.
10:06
We live in a post AI world, there are probably relatively realistic videos of
10:10
Elon Musk using a lightsaber and Kim Jong Un breakdancing to Chappel Roan
10:14
songs with Vladimir Putin. Plenty of people out there wouldn’t believe zombies were real
10:18
or a problem until the undead were bashing down their door, and by then, it’s already too late.
10:24
And it’s not just conspiracy theorists, either.
10:26
5:
10:27
This is another one of those things that you’d never see featured in a movie or video game,
10:32
because it seems just plain tedious - but it’s something
10:35
that in real life would be a huge problem.
10:37
Do you know how to darn a worn-out sock? Or knit new ones from scratch? Yeah… didn’t think so.
10:43
But considering we’ve already established that you’ll be walking everywhere, unless you’ve got
10:47
some Doc Martens or high-end work boots, you’d be busting your socks and shoes in no time.
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Then you’re rolling the dice.
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Will you be risking your life to raid shoe stores in the hopes that they have your size,
10:57
or, even grosser, will you be peeling the boots off of every corpse you find,
11:02
in hopes that they’ll also fit you? Seems like a loser’s game,
11:05
no matter how you slice it, and it’s an apocalypse problem you’d never see coming.
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And once your feet are wrecked,
11:11
it gets even worse - because you can’t carry your entire life on your back.
11:14
4:
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Everyone knows bullets don’t weigh anything in video games, and thankfully,
11:19
you’ll find them on most corpses - or in vases if you’re playing Resident Evil.
11:23
In real life? Not so much.
11:25
Your average common infantry marine will carry up to 70 pounds (31 kg) of gear. And they have
11:29
access to vehicles, support, and are in the peak of physical fitness. Are you?
11:34
In an apocalypse, if you’re a nomad on foot,
11:36
everything you own has to come with you - clothes, weapons, food, water, ammo,
11:41
survival gear - and every new item becomes a stressful, life-or-death tradeoff. A few extra
11:46
rounds of ammo or more emergency water? These inventory management choices are life or death,
11:51
especially if you’ve got a horde on your tail. Thankfully, you’ve got an unexpected ally…
11:56
3:
11:57
Every zombie media fan knows that there are two main types: Undead zombies - think George
12:02
Romero - and Infected Zombies - 28 Days Later. Both have unique advantages and
12:08
drawbacks. One that you might not expect for both, but mainly the undead zombies,
12:13
is that nature would basically reject these guys in a variety of ways.
12:17
Humidity would hasten decomposition, meaning that these marching death machines would quickly get
12:22
mushy. Bugs would also see them as a feast, and if the virus or other force animating them isn’t
12:27
zoonotic, this won’t have any health implications for the rest of us. Rotting corpses also wouldn’t
12:32
heal, meaning any injury they sustained in combat would only get worse over time,
12:37
just as muscle atrophy would make them get slowly weaker. Tooth damage from both natural decay and
12:43
violence would make their only means of passing on the undead plague less effective over time.
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While all of the rotting stuff would be less of an issue for
12:49
the more modern Infected style zombies, they might have an even bigger problem…
12:54
2:
12:55
Anyone else rooting for zombie-on-zombie violence? Because honestly, this is one of
12:59
the biggest plot conveniences in zombie media - added purely because if you think about it,
13:04
it would stop most zombie apocalypses from ever starting in the first place.
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Think about it… if a disease drives you violently insane, why would you
13:11
suddenly have the self-control to only attack healthy people… and
13:15
ignore the other screaming maniacs right next to you?
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Realistically, you’d never see hordes of zombies like this, because in their blind fury,
13:23
they’d wipe each other out. Any excuse of “the virus drives them to infected healthy victims”
13:28
is just another piece of artistic license. It treats a virus like some kind of sentient
13:32
hivemind rather than brainless microorganisms that just produce consistent symptoms.
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It’s almost a little disappointing,
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but not nearly as disappointing as our ultimate zombie revelation…
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1:
13:44
Who hasn’t dreamed of slicing through zombies with a katana? It’s a fantasy in every zombie
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survivalist’s heart to take on the undead Samurai-style. But according to some experts,
13:55
that’d be more likely to get us killed than make us a zombie slaying god.
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Like all weapons, katanas are most dangerous in the hands of experts. Even if you do know
14:03
what you’re doing, they can’t always reliably even cut through tatami mats, which aren’t
14:07
moving and trying to kill you. If surrounded by a group of zombies, you’re most likely to
14:11
get your sword stuck in the body of the first one you try to slice while the others eat you alive.
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And even if you do get to fulfil your fantasy of taking on a single zombie with a katana,
14:20
and slice off its head in a single strike, congratulations,
14:24
you’re now covered in infected blood. We just hope it was worth it.
14:27
Now go check out “Why a Zombie Apocalypse Is Inevitable”, or watch this instead!
Zombie Survival. Your Fantasy is a DELUSION - Video học tiếng Anh
