 You heard about it on the news at first. Small things. A man in Florida eating a person's face. Then the hospital shut down in Miami for mysterious reasons. And then you woke up this morning. And it had begun. The zombie apocalypse is here. And you know, then it's gonna be over in just a few days because, well, really, a zombie outbreak's not all that serious. So outside of SCP-008, which is the wiki's take on the zombie virus, there's an infinite number of takes on zombies, really. But while the concept has some origins in Haitian folklore and religion, the modern zombie traces its roots back to HP Lovecraft's Herbert West reanimator, which itself draws somewhat heavily upon Frankenstein. But literary origins aside, the truth of the matter is that reanimated corpses returning to feast upon the living have become kind of an enduring horror trope. It makes sense that it would exist on the SCP wiki as well, giving the wiki's origins in horror, contemporary fantasy and science fiction, which are all interrelated to most zombie stories. But here's the thing. The version on the wiki, SCP-008, which is called the zombie plague, it doesn't really do anything new with the concept. And really, the only thing it does differently than most actually makes it less dangerous and less scary. So it's a prion instead of a virus. And the description follows the basic format of what a zombie infection usually includes. It always killed its victims, and it's impossible to ward off infections if you've been bitten. And it turns people into slow walking, but very hard to kill, mindless automatons. Or at least they're hard to kill as long as you don't hit them in the head. But let's stop a second and look at the infection vector. To understand how dangerous an infectious disease like this could be in the modern era, we really should examine history. We'll take a look at the two worst pandemics in history and see if there are any parallels. The first one is the Black Death. And it took 22 years to kill somewhere between 75 million and 200 million people. And the Spanish flu, which only really took two years to kill 75 million people. Now, even though the Black Death was a more deadly plague, it's not really useful here as a comparison to me. The world was a lot less connected in the mid-1300s, which is why it lasted as long as it did. It took a really long time for it to spread from place to place. And then once it spread, it would take root. But no one really at the time understood what caused diseases. Germ theory wasn't a thing. Guns weren't a thing. The Spanish flu epidemic, on the other hand, is a bit more modern. 1918 was only about 100 years ago, and it also infected between a quarter and a third of the human population at the time. But it also only killed somewhere around, what, 5 to 10% of the total population of the Earth? Which, don't get me wrong, that's really bad. It's historically bad. It's almost unimaginable to think of that many people dying, but it's not the end of the world. So really, our first barrier to understanding how SCP-008 would be a threat to the world is how would it even spread to everyone? It specifically lists as not being an airborne or waterborne infection, which, by the way, kind of makes the plague and Spanish flu even worse comparisons. An airborne and waterborne infection is very easy to spread. Something that spreads only by bodily fluid contact is very difficult to spread. I mean, you can get infected by getting bitten by an infected individual, but a body has always been an incredibly inefficient method of transferring an infection. Rabies is a good thing you want to look at if you want to understand that, but, like, it's really hard to imagine a worldwide rabies outbreak, even if there wasn't a vaccine for it already. Back in 1885, before there was a rabies vaccine, it was still incredibly rare. And before we think, well, maybe people weren't living in concentrated population centers, nope, that's also not true. In fact, concentrated population centers that facilitated plagues go all the way back to antiquity. London, by the way, faced all sorts of plagues over and over again in the 1800s due to a lack of modern health care and the density of their population, but they never had a rabies pandemic. Now, part of this is that the human mouth wasn't really well suited for that. And you put food into your mouth if you want to eat it. And if you can't do that, it's really awkward to get a bite of anything, trading a huge burger, and you'll see what I mean. Now, imagine someone trying to pull that burger away from you, and you might see the problem with a zombie trying to bite someone's arm. Best case scenario, you do manage to get a bite in, but then it's going to be really hard for the victim to hide the wound. You think in a world of zombies, people aren't going to check each other for wounds somewhat regularly? And the worst part of SCP-008 is the period of time it takes before symptoms appear. You begin to display flu-like symptoms in just three hours, which means your infection will be very hard to hide to anyone who knows what to look for. As soon as you say something like, oh man, I haven't feeling really bad today, someone's going to say, take off all of your clothes, I want to see if you've been bitten. Oh, you have been bitten. Well, it's time to die now. And before you fall into the coma that leads to you becoming a zombie, like four hours later, you already suffer a period of severe dementia. And if you think you can hide your infection while you're suffering from dementia, I've got a bridge to sell you in Arizona. And again, in a world where SCP-008 is out among the general population, everyone will know exactly what to look for because they will have seen this before. But since the plague, the flu, and even rabies are poor choices to compare to, let's look at one last disease which has a similar transmission vector, Ebola. The Ebola virus disease, which is what it's actually called, is one of several hemorrhagic fevers and is almost always transmitted by a direct contact with bodily fluids. But even to this day, Ebola kills too obviously and too quickly to turn into a true pandemic. Even in Nigeria, when Ebola flares up there, it just flares up and then dies out very quickly. And Nigeria is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. But you know what? Let's put all that aside and pretend that somehow after all of this, the infection has actually managed to spread to 99% of the world's population, despite bombs and guns and tanks and aircraft, which we could get into, but I don't really think we need to. But let me tell you, the military could handle zombies pretty easily since they can't coordinate to fight back. But you find yourself as one of the few survivors. Chin up. The zombie has given up pretty much everything that makes it dangerous as a human. Because humans are dangerous. There are a few things that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, we're great distance runners, we're not maybe not the best, but we are probably top five among all species. We're the only species that can really throw accurately into any appreciable distance. And the most important thing we have is language, which gives us the ability to coordinate with others. Because yeah, humans are easy to kill individually, but we're very hard to kill when we're working together. And you might say, well, a zombie horde would be an issue too. Those zombies would be sort of working together. But no, not really. Each individual member of a horde would be acting individually. There's no coordination because they don't have the brain for it. So zombies aren't going to cut off your escape route while somebody attacks the front. They'll just shamble in your direction very slowly, which is another thing. I mean, assume you're 10 meters away from a horde of 1,000 zombies, which is far too many to take easily in melee and probably too many to hole up and shoot since 1,000 zombies could probably break down almost any building that's not made of steel or concrete. Although at this point, I should probably mention that there are about 12 billion rounds of ammunition created every year that are then added to the stockpile from every year before that. And there's only 7 billion people on earth. So let's pretend like you don't decide to shoot them with your mini, mini bullets. And instead, you decide to run. Well, most people will be like, well, don't run away from the zombies. Zombies don't need to rest and they'll catch you and then they'll kill you. Except no, zombies shamble. They don't even walk that quickly because their motor functions are about as basic as they can be. But let's be generous and say they can walk one and a half miles per hour. And a regular walking speed for a healthy adult, which is going to be you, is going to be three. So at a comfortable walking pace, you are twice as fast as they are. Because if you walk in one direction for six hours, you're going to get 18 miles away from the zombies. And the zombies are only going to be able to cover nine miles. All that means is going to take them another six hours to get to you, which gives you plenty of time to sleep. And really, the zombies would still be an hour away if you took, say, a five-hour nap. You mix in a little bit of jogging as well. You're going to have more than enough time to find food, water, ammunition, or a good place to hide and let them pass you by. And that assumes that some animal doesn't distract them along the way. So, I mean, if you can hear them or see them, and I don't know how you wouldn't be able to hear a thousand zombies coming for you, or any zombie coming for you, to be honest with you, but any large group that you couldn't take on in melee makes no sense to me. Now, all this isn't to say that a zombie virus couldn't be designed that works fictionally. I'm not sure in the real world how in the world this would work, but if your zombie infection is air or waterborne, and it can be spread by individuals for long periods of time, say, like one or two weeks prior to their developing symptoms, you could end up with an overnight apocalypse. And if the zombies can run, there's a serious issue that they could kill you because then they don't have to rest, and they can also be faster than you. But SCP-008 doesn't take any of this into account. It's just a classic old-school zombie plague, and because of that, it's not really a threat to anyone. To be fair, it's really barely a threat to whichever site it's housed at. Anyway, that's all for today. If you wanted, you could join these fine patrons over at patreon.com forward slash decimarian. They help keep this channel going, and be sure to hit the subscribe button as well. Thanks for watching.