#give us scurvy and it's curtains lol... we don't need viral zombies if a new strain of polio makes a comeback. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

princessnijireiki · 2 years ago

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anyway our CNS & brains are pretty complex, like we've barely figured out getting people with partial spinal cord damage back driving their own bodies + when we do it's still a roll of the dice & the processes are not all well understood... encephalitis can caused locked-in-ness like with sleeping sicknesses, akinetic mutism, etc where the body itself is not physically incapable of movement & action, but nothing is out there that jumps in and takes over from a driver who's paralyzed or asleep at the wheel... that's not actually a thing, it's fun speculative fiction but not representative of reality— so really, no worries lol

#the other thing is... we're megafauna?#like cordyceps hitches a ride on hymenoptera to get from point A to point B as part of their life cycle. no conscious goal #bc people often say ''oh a fungus/virus/microbe WANTS to spread & reproduce'' it doesn't WANT shit.#it is a single cell organism & s/t not even that— viruses are weird & not even always technically alive UNTIL a host or vector is infected #but my point being... we're like ''gone girl''...#amy dunne saying ''you think you'd be happy with piggybacking on my body on the way to something else? no way baby! I'm it.''#microbes don't NEED to do all that highly specialized evolution to take over my legs like that & walk over to a tree.#cordyceps needs more than one ant. nothing needs more than a potential for human to human transmission x 8 billion.#and you don't need my brain or body control to do that when you have my blood my spit my lungs etc #path of least resistance + greatest effectiveness; a zombie virus doesn't need to evolve. we have aids we have rabies we have sars #give us scurvy and it's curtains lol... we don't need viral zombies if a new strain of polio makes a comeback.#we're the tripods in war of the worlds and it's our own planet that can kill us with a cold.#but it's more fun to catastrophize about a Big Scary Fantasy Germ than to be like ''get a DPT vaccine.''#it won't be zombies; it will be infinitely more mundane; it will be infinitely worse.

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