The Zombie Notpocalypse

Much like the ubiquitous vampires of the recent Twilight era, zombies are a hot commodity, as evidenced by the popularity of The Walking Dead and World War Z. Sure, zombies have probably passed the peak of their popularity, but they may have a couple of years before they become as overexposed and tedious as the vampires.

One unexpected consequence of all this zombie popularity is that it has pretty much eliminated the possibility that the zombie apocalypse will ever occur. I know, you’d have thought that the major problem with that would be biological, that dead organisms can’t really get up and walk around after they are, well, dead. But the presence of zombies within pop culture poses another difficulty to the zombies, should the problem of animating necrotic tissue ever be solved, and that is, we all now know how to deal with them.

Let’s face it, the only thing that zombies really have going for them is surprise, no one expects the dead to get up and start biting people. In a world without a pop culture reference to zombies, people would probably be confused and uncertain how to deal with the newly resurrected corpses. But us, we’ve got this covered. After the initial shock wore off, we’d get down to business pretty quickly, shooting walking corpses in the head and making sure that the dead were properly disposed of.  Even if the generals and admirals were uncertain of how to respond to an outbreak, soldiers and sailors raised on Resident Evil and other video games would step up and squash the threat fairly quickly. Sure there might be some initial panic and maybe even quite a few causalities, but ultimately the zombie apocalypse will never have a chance.