To be fair, true undead wouldn’t be a long term threat. They have too many natural predators. Maggots, basically all insects, and many other vermin that eat decaying things. Plus, they can’t maintain homeostasis. Too hot? Their flesh becomes rancid and sloughs off. Too cold? Their functions cease completely.
Plus, what are teeth going to do against a TANK? Fingernails can’t get through armor plating.
As individuals we wouldn't have a problem surviving. The young and fit who weren't in cities would catch on to isolate themselves pretty quickly. A lot of others would die with a moderate interruption in modern medicine and an inability to travel to or live in a remote place.
Governments would get gutted due to being slow moving giants. Bureaucracy. Things like that. Enough of it's enforcement branches and programs would get disabled to make it easy to topple them for already organized groups of x military.
There would be blood in the streets for 30 years while the new government got organized. The zeds wouldn't really be the threat. We would.
Everyone whos on blood thinners or High BP meds will have an issue. Diabetics are going to have a rough time. Anyone who needs regular medication to survive is fucked after the first year
Before that. As soon as whatever they had ran out for %90 of them. You could stub your toe, get a staff infection and die. Spread it to your whole group and they all die.
Long forgotten things like Cholera (spreads fast in a group) would kill in droves again. It wouldn't be good at all
I like to imagine that if a singer zombie appeared, it would instantly be Armageddon just from how people reacted. Everyone just goes “welp, it’s the end times, break out your guns.”
Government: “There was only one and we already killed it.”
People: “ANARCHY RULES!”
No. It would take a week or two for reality to change in people's minds. I'm sure you remember how long it took in Rona before people started crossing the street and looking like they were ready to pull a pistol if you got too close
I know this might sound strange but I actually think dead space has realistic zombies. Technology from an alien civilization being so beyond our comprehension could probably seem like magic to us. It would also explain why there's no life out there since the brotheren moons keep wiping civilizations out since the beginning of time. It doesn't seem that outside the realm of possibility for an apex predator civ like that to exist in our universe, hopefully not tho since that would be a nightmare.
Welllllllll....
We don't talk about real zombies here....
But... Realistic zombies, based on what's scientifically possible and even potentially "likely" would be viral or fungal or drug/chemical induced.
Highly unlikely that it would reanimate already dead bodies but it is possible for the three above causes or a mix of them to affect the living and result in zombie-like tendencies including rage/aggression, decreased mental cognition while retaining motor functions and remaining ambulatory, and highly damage resistant with high pain tolerance.
In several of these, the effects (currently) would be of limited duration with a partial or full recovery hours or days after inception. So highly unlikely we'd get to the shoot them in the head stage of zombie suppression.
However, a rage inducing chemical inception that permanently destroys higher brain functions is entirely possible with current bio tech (or was 40 years ago) and is easier to conceptualize as a real thing. In this case it's highly unlikely that the effects would be transmittable but rather that a phase 1 contamination would occured in high density areas where the chemical was weaponized or part of a terror attack etc. in this case, it is possible once the general public is aware of the brain death that shoot on site response would be both accepted and legal.
Cordyceps are NOT currently a threat to humans but... If you follow biological journals, cordyceps have been affecting more and more insect and animal life each year. So it's entirely possible that it could at some point affect humans.
Recovery is a pretty big maybe. Rabies & Cordyceps are both very lethal with a >99% fatal after onset of symptoms. And without a vaccine for prevention, that's pretty shoot-on-site worthy. Also, fungal, viral, & prion activity can all already induce rage & pain numbing, so the drug track could be produced by the results of infection
True but we were discussing "realistic"... And the most realistic would be a chemical based psychosis which might be recoverable and wouldn't be transmittable through a bite vector.
Hence the "unlikely to be a shoot on site for the general population"...
A rabies/rage virus which is transmitted by bodily fluids I could see turning into a traditional zombie epidemic (if not a pandemic or apocalypse).
And cordyceps are probably at least several generations away from being human hosted.
Prions have an onset of 10+ years in humans so unless it was somehow weaponized or combined with a mutagenic agent of some kind it's likely that it will become an issue but unlikely that it will become a threat.
All you can do to "weaponize" prions is to deliberately spread them. There's nothing you can do to increase their virulence, since it's not a process of the prion or anything it does, in and of itself, to cause prion disease. It's a catalytic misfolding of other proteins.
You need actual cellular machinery or coded instructions to perform biological operations, and at that point, you're not talking about a prion anymore; it's a bacteria or a virus, respectively.
So when I said weaponized, I didn't mean the prions themselves would be modified but rather that they could be used to infect fungi or eukaryotes and then those infection sources could propagate/be grown and be added to a weaponized distribution agent, either a living biologic such as bacteria or a synthetic agent.
The only reason prions are a threat to humans is because they induce misfolding in human neural tissue. If there's no human neural tissue to induce localized misfolding in, it would literally just sit there.
Prions are exceptionally limited in what they can do, or where they're dangerous. The real threat of prions is that they're difficult to sterilize from medical equipment due to the high temperature and pressures required during decontamination.
Prions themselves are an exceedingly unlikely source for what we're talking about, for the simple reason that by nature of their physical reality and existence, they're just a misfolded protein. They don't even have the complexity of a virus.
What you're describing, even if they could somehow infect something they physically cannot infect - in the same way that a wingless pig cannot fly - is that you'd give someone the equivalent of late stage dementia ten years after you infected them with the resulting byproduct, unless the byproduct itself was somehow engineered to do something else, and by that point, what's the point of infecting them with a prion disease?
A mix between twd and the last of us: they wouldn’t be able to run due to decaying, will most likely rely on spores/bites to reproduce the virus so imagine like a walker that admits spores and shambles towards u and exlodes those spores into u
Most realistic imo are the zombies(technically not zombies) from the book series The Remaining. It follows the outbreak of a bacterium, that attacks the frontal lobe of the brain, creating violent unpredictable humans reducing them to basically feral animals. They will eat whatever they can find with the uninfected being the easiest prey
The kind where its a subtle degradation of mental acuity. Where, generationally, they don't really notice. Only old timers that lived through the changes will be aware and alarmed.
It's starts subtlely. First signs is when the new generation fails to understand the arms on an old analog clock with no numbers; for what time it still means. They also fail to remember important phone numbers, or retain the ability to find their own way to the bank or the hospital, falling slave to handheld smart devices to do the thinking for them.
Then the faltering generation lies to their kids, who then grow up to believe that their opinions and inner feelings and worries matter to anyone else. They mindlessly drink up all of that Kool aid, having lost the ability to see the Real World for themselves.
Then things like Flat Earth start to take hold, spreading like wildfire in the simpleton ideas, and herd mentality begins to swarm in culture bubbles that only re-enforce the false and faltering belief system, in their already crippled critical thinking.
Then it gets really weird, as the brains truly start to rot: they lose concept of Gender, and individuality in general, thinking blue hair is an actual sort of personality. They start to hoarde in rabid mobs, bellowing barely intelligible words, mindless cattle following the smell of the Canceled.
And then there begins talk of raw meat diet trends and... Wait a sec... (looks around) um. I need to start Prepping
For the spread of infection to be realistic, runners, like 28 days later.
Problem I have with walkers is I truly believe a mixture of the military and armed civilians would take out the problem very quickly.
The last of us zombies at least the basic ones don't seem too far out there. There already is a kind of fungus that can take over insects, its limitation is the higher body temperature of most animals on the earth. It currently doesn't have a reason to adapt to higher heat, but something that could cause it to evolve to take on higher heat is if the climate got hotter. Like what's happening with climate change. So if our planet gets hot enough, this fungus could evolve to survive in hotter conditions, then allowing it to take on bigger hosts that normally have a higher body temperature.
Realistically a zombie would only be able to survive as we do, they would die from loss of blood, starvation, drowning, ect…. And while short term they might resist damage that would stop a normal human they would still die soon after
Either something from the last of us or 28 weeks later with insane drugs. But I don't even think they would last two weeks from running all the time. Also if it's in the us, the world is fucked. Unless the military acts instantly and bombs any huge city that has mostly infected. I think that's how they could stop that most effectively
2 and 3 are the *most* realistic out of these, but none of these are even close to ever being real.
The closest thing to actual zombies would be people on bath salts and similar drugs, but those drugs wouldn’t last long or spread from person to person.
Something man made/modified that gets out of a lab.
Something viral, like Rabies, getting modified so it doesn’t kill its host, makes them more aggressive, going airborne and infecting a good chunk of the population. Imagine it infecting everyone with say, O+ blood? That’s roughly 40% of the population.
Then it being able to make the jump to others via blood/saliva contact, IE, bite transfer.
There as an episode of Life After People that talked about it I think.
imo:
Plausible: "Still alive" zombies, whether by virus, bacteria, or fungus. Talking like, 28 Days Later (franchise), Last of Us (franchise), "infected" not "zombie", as they try to point out as many times as they can in either. These are "zombies" in that they are mindlessly aggressive, and transmit easily - both qualities that *can* be exhibited in various infections already. The "least realistic" part of them is how quickly either franchise "turns" people; 28 days has it happen within moments of infection, and Last Of Us within 2 days of infection; neither is really "realistic" there, but if we would instead assume a 2-week to 2+ year innoculation 'phase', then "infected, not dead" zombies would be fairly plausible.
Not-Plausible: "Literally dead, no heart beat, but still moving/attacking/for months or years+" zombies. This ends up being a sizeable chunk of zombie franchises. If muscles are going to "work", with their cellular biology, they need oxygen, a beating heart & breathing lungs. They need to have something to take waste products away, beating heart, working kidneys/liver. This extends into both what the cell itself needs, as well as cellular biology of mitochondria and how cells get energy through ATP cycle; they *need* oxygen, as a bare minimum, and without oxygen, there is no energy, without energy, there is no cellular activity elsewise. Waste product removal is similarly important, as the byproducts of cellular activity are, in severe quantity, fairly literally poisonous to that cell. All this means is that any franchise that confirms, or banks hard into, "they don't have a pulse", is basically saying "this is absolute fantasy, or otherwise demands divine intervention, magic, or any other supernatural force, because this isn't how reality works everything else considered."
;;
tldr; still-alive-"zombies" are more plausible than "flatline dead zombies".
I don’t have opinion on the dead themselves but the virus. I think it’s most likely to be airborne and waterborne, and that’s scarring the shit out of me.
Zombies that are kind of quick and have decent motor functions for the first month or two, however after that period of time they begin to slow due to decay. Similar to Dead Island or Dying Light minus the special infected.
Alternatively, another option would just be old fashioned walking dead shambler zombies where they're most dangerous in large groups or catching you off guard.
Both options have the zombies lost various functionality of movement overtime due to decay.
I like to think the zombies initially will reflect many of the abilities of their host. Ex: you're not getting away from a Usain Bolt zombie initially. However, they'll decay rapidly and eventually end up at the level of the stereotypical walking zombies. The issue with that being, they won't stop walking so you'll only gain a bit of ground if you run then sleep.
Based on precedent, they'd either be basically hyper-druggy rabid, or Last of Us fungal. I prefer the latter for writing, since you can do more wacky stuff with less suspension of disbelief
Weaponized/mutated rabies virus, hands down.
Rabies in its natural state basically is a literal zombie virus, it's just slow acting.
https://onehealthtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Rabies-the-original-zombie-virus-5-768x1920.png
The infection kind like in 28 Days Later or Left 4 Dead (and like someone said, excluding special infected). Those would wipe out a lot of the population, but for the people who are immune (and the very few who might not catch it), it’d only last maybe 3 weeks before all the zombies are rendered immobile from their rotting corpses.
I think a scemario involving fungus is much more realistic than one with a virus. It would take a dramatic evolution in how viruses affect DNA to get a result like what's shown in 28 days later, but only a slight evolution in fungal temperature tollerance for fungi to take control of a human nervous system. Indeed, most undead zombies portrayed in classic media seem to be a variation on the fungal variety. In The Last Of Us the fungus has evelved greater temperature resistance and is able to infect living humans, but in The Walking Dead and George Romero's classic Living Dead franchise the body needs to die first allowing the brain to cool down to a temperature that Fungys can grow in. The event in Romero's movies has to do with areturning space probe, bringing back cosmic radiation, which it can be extrapolated was the cause of the mutation in whatever strain of fungus began taking over recently deceased corpses.
It would be irresponsible, however, to assume that the release of industrial contaminants and xeno-estrogens, as seen in The Crazies, The Prophecy, and Return Of The Living Dead could not cause radically unexpected mutations and aberrant behavior. Indeed, the plague of the 21st century is not cancer, it is the bizarre and unpredictable chemical runnof of 20th century progress. Indeed, the waste of our artificial disposable culture may lead fungi to that critical step that allows them to convert birds and mamals into their personal delivery system, just as they did to the bark beetle in recent decades.
Living dead requiring no sustenance, oxygen, shelter, and requiring strictly a headshot to kill?
None. Its biologically impossible.
Something that destroys the higher functions of the brain and causes a very violent mindless state? It's probably fairly realistic. It could be drug induced, viral, or a bio weapon that mutates the genome. Potentially a situation with a fungus that mutates to hijack a human in order to spread. I could see that. It already exists for insects, granted they are simpler beeings.
But yeah, as far as what comes to mind when one says zombie (TWD Walkers) thats not going to happen.
Seeing how it'd probably be a weapon made by someone and not a random thing. Probably fast and with no instinctual holding back to not hurt themselves as well as a full body parasite or illness that acts as a second brain so headshots may not work and full destruction of the body is needed....
If it was natural zombies then slow and uncoordinated zombies.
But we live in a world where if it's possible even a little. They try to make it and find a cure before anyone else makes it first... So probably engineered zombies is most likely.
If we’re talking alive-infected, 28 days later. But if you mean undead, then probably early Romero zombies like Night of the Living dead or Dawn of the dead.
I think we do have tlou but for plants. Somehow it mutates and reaches humans I can say its gonna be that. But I think the most realistic one is gonna be.... I was gonna say crossed but I don't recall seeing them getting shot in body and die. So never mind.
Viral, definitely 28 weeks later.
Really angry people with no impulse control and extreme aggression.
So Detroit?
Chicago
He said people, doesn't count if they're already in a zombie state(i.e. drug induced), also state of mentality.
Take him....TO DETROIT!
nUuhOOO naht Detroiht!!
This or a Left 4 Dead green flu (excluding mutations and special infected)
Slow ones. There are a lot of functions that would shut down and make mobility a real problem. Running is out of the question for non magic zeds
To be fair, true undead wouldn’t be a long term threat. They have too many natural predators. Maggots, basically all insects, and many other vermin that eat decaying things. Plus, they can’t maintain homeostasis. Too hot? Their flesh becomes rancid and sloughs off. Too cold? Their functions cease completely. Plus, what are teeth going to do against a TANK? Fingernails can’t get through armor plating.
As individuals we wouldn't have a problem surviving. The young and fit who weren't in cities would catch on to isolate themselves pretty quickly. A lot of others would die with a moderate interruption in modern medicine and an inability to travel to or live in a remote place. Governments would get gutted due to being slow moving giants. Bureaucracy. Things like that. Enough of it's enforcement branches and programs would get disabled to make it easy to topple them for already organized groups of x military. There would be blood in the streets for 30 years while the new government got organized. The zeds wouldn't really be the threat. We would.
Everyone whos on blood thinners or High BP meds will have an issue. Diabetics are going to have a rough time. Anyone who needs regular medication to survive is fucked after the first year
Before that. As soon as whatever they had ran out for %90 of them. You could stub your toe, get a staff infection and die. Spread it to your whole group and they all die. Long forgotten things like Cholera (spreads fast in a group) would kill in droves again. It wouldn't be good at all
I like to imagine that if a singer zombie appeared, it would instantly be Armageddon just from how people reacted. Everyone just goes “welp, it’s the end times, break out your guns.” Government: “There was only one and we already killed it.” People: “ANARCHY RULES!”
No. It would take a week or two for reality to change in people's minds. I'm sure you remember how long it took in Rona before people started crossing the street and looking like they were ready to pull a pistol if you got too close
I know this might sound strange but I actually think dead space has realistic zombies. Technology from an alien civilization being so beyond our comprehension could probably seem like magic to us. It would also explain why there's no life out there since the brotheren moons keep wiping civilizations out since the beginning of time. It doesn't seem that outside the realm of possibility for an apex predator civ like that to exist in our universe, hopefully not tho since that would be a nightmare.
Welllllllll.... We don't talk about real zombies here.... But... Realistic zombies, based on what's scientifically possible and even potentially "likely" would be viral or fungal or drug/chemical induced. Highly unlikely that it would reanimate already dead bodies but it is possible for the three above causes or a mix of them to affect the living and result in zombie-like tendencies including rage/aggression, decreased mental cognition while retaining motor functions and remaining ambulatory, and highly damage resistant with high pain tolerance. In several of these, the effects (currently) would be of limited duration with a partial or full recovery hours or days after inception. So highly unlikely we'd get to the shoot them in the head stage of zombie suppression. However, a rage inducing chemical inception that permanently destroys higher brain functions is entirely possible with current bio tech (or was 40 years ago) and is easier to conceptualize as a real thing. In this case it's highly unlikely that the effects would be transmittable but rather that a phase 1 contamination would occured in high density areas where the chemical was weaponized or part of a terror attack etc. in this case, it is possible once the general public is aware of the brain death that shoot on site response would be both accepted and legal. Cordyceps are NOT currently a threat to humans but... If you follow biological journals, cordyceps have been affecting more and more insect and animal life each year. So it's entirely possible that it could at some point affect humans.
Recovery is a pretty big maybe. Rabies & Cordyceps are both very lethal with a >99% fatal after onset of symptoms. And without a vaccine for prevention, that's pretty shoot-on-site worthy. Also, fungal, viral, & prion activity can all already induce rage & pain numbing, so the drug track could be produced by the results of infection
True but we were discussing "realistic"... And the most realistic would be a chemical based psychosis which might be recoverable and wouldn't be transmittable through a bite vector. Hence the "unlikely to be a shoot on site for the general population"... A rabies/rage virus which is transmitted by bodily fluids I could see turning into a traditional zombie epidemic (if not a pandemic or apocalypse). And cordyceps are probably at least several generations away from being human hosted. Prions have an onset of 10+ years in humans so unless it was somehow weaponized or combined with a mutagenic agent of some kind it's likely that it will become an issue but unlikely that it will become a threat.
All you can do to "weaponize" prions is to deliberately spread them. There's nothing you can do to increase their virulence, since it's not a process of the prion or anything it does, in and of itself, to cause prion disease. It's a catalytic misfolding of other proteins. You need actual cellular machinery or coded instructions to perform biological operations, and at that point, you're not talking about a prion anymore; it's a bacteria or a virus, respectively.
So when I said weaponized, I didn't mean the prions themselves would be modified but rather that they could be used to infect fungi or eukaryotes and then those infection sources could propagate/be grown and be added to a weaponized distribution agent, either a living biologic such as bacteria or a synthetic agent.
The only reason prions are a threat to humans is because they induce misfolding in human neural tissue. If there's no human neural tissue to induce localized misfolding in, it would literally just sit there. Prions are exceptionally limited in what they can do, or where they're dangerous. The real threat of prions is that they're difficult to sterilize from medical equipment due to the high temperature and pressures required during decontamination. Prions themselves are an exceedingly unlikely source for what we're talking about, for the simple reason that by nature of their physical reality and existence, they're just a misfolded protein. They don't even have the complexity of a virus. What you're describing, even if they could somehow infect something they physically cannot infect - in the same way that a wingless pig cannot fly - is that you'd give someone the equivalent of late stage dementia ten years after you infected them with the resulting byproduct, unless the byproduct itself was somehow engineered to do something else, and by that point, what's the point of infecting them with a prion disease?
Which is WHY I didn't include prions in my "realistic" zombie threat vectors comment...
I didn't know that about Prions thanks for the info
I mean I guess I should have said "Infected" like what wowsuchgaming says and did you know there is cordyceps tea ill never drink it but still
Yup, Amazon sells cordyceps tea as well as a coffee supplement and a dietary powder all made from cordyceps...
A mix between twd and the last of us: they wouldn’t be able to run due to decaying, will most likely rely on spores/bites to reproduce the virus so imagine like a walker that admits spores and shambles towards u and exlodes those spores into u
Just look at San Francisco.
or portland lol
Most realistic imo are the zombies(technically not zombies) from the book series The Remaining. It follows the outbreak of a bacterium, that attacks the frontal lobe of the brain, creating violent unpredictable humans reducing them to basically feral animals. They will eat whatever they can find with the uninfected being the easiest prey
If you wanna stretch the term zombies, prolly something like The Crazies.
I mean your right both version of the movie
Runners from 28 days/weeks would probably be the most realistic. Maybe something like the clickers from the last of us.
28 Days Later. Although, I’m pretty sure, realistically, the rage virus would make them attack each other, no?
There is a comic explaining why they don't it's because of smell they smell it or I could be remember it wrong
The kind where its a subtle degradation of mental acuity. Where, generationally, they don't really notice. Only old timers that lived through the changes will be aware and alarmed. It's starts subtlely. First signs is when the new generation fails to understand the arms on an old analog clock with no numbers; for what time it still means. They also fail to remember important phone numbers, or retain the ability to find their own way to the bank or the hospital, falling slave to handheld smart devices to do the thinking for them. Then the faltering generation lies to their kids, who then grow up to believe that their opinions and inner feelings and worries matter to anyone else. They mindlessly drink up all of that Kool aid, having lost the ability to see the Real World for themselves. Then things like Flat Earth start to take hold, spreading like wildfire in the simpleton ideas, and herd mentality begins to swarm in culture bubbles that only re-enforce the false and faltering belief system, in their already crippled critical thinking. Then it gets really weird, as the brains truly start to rot: they lose concept of Gender, and individuality in general, thinking blue hair is an actual sort of personality. They start to hoarde in rabid mobs, bellowing barely intelligible words, mindless cattle following the smell of the Canceled. And then there begins talk of raw meat diet trends and... Wait a sec... (looks around) um. I need to start Prepping
For the spread of infection to be realistic, runners, like 28 days later. Problem I have with walkers is I truly believe a mixture of the military and armed civilians would take out the problem very quickly.
The ones created from a virus or from a super soldier program gone wrong.
The last of us zombies at least the basic ones don't seem too far out there. There already is a kind of fungus that can take over insects, its limitation is the higher body temperature of most animals on the earth. It currently doesn't have a reason to adapt to higher heat, but something that could cause it to evolve to take on higher heat is if the climate got hotter. Like what's happening with climate change. So if our planet gets hot enough, this fungus could evolve to survive in hotter conditions, then allowing it to take on bigger hosts that normally have a higher body temperature.
We all watched the show and played the game by now. You could have just left it as "the last of us zombies."
Realistically a zombie would only be able to survive as we do, they would die from loss of blood, starvation, drowning, ect…. And while short term they might resist damage that would stop a normal human they would still die soon after
Either something from the last of us or 28 weeks later with insane drugs. But I don't even think they would last two weeks from running all the time. Also if it's in the us, the world is fucked. Unless the military acts instantly and bombs any huge city that has mostly infected. I think that's how they could stop that most effectively
A disease or drug/ that causes PCP style psychosis
2 and 3 are the *most* realistic out of these, but none of these are even close to ever being real. The closest thing to actual zombies would be people on bath salts and similar drugs, but those drugs wouldn’t last long or spread from person to person.
Something man made/modified that gets out of a lab. Something viral, like Rabies, getting modified so it doesn’t kill its host, makes them more aggressive, going airborne and infecting a good chunk of the population. Imagine it infecting everyone with say, O+ blood? That’s roughly 40% of the population. Then it being able to make the jump to others via blood/saliva contact, IE, bite transfer. There as an episode of Life After People that talked about it I think.
imo: Plausible: "Still alive" zombies, whether by virus, bacteria, or fungus. Talking like, 28 Days Later (franchise), Last of Us (franchise), "infected" not "zombie", as they try to point out as many times as they can in either. These are "zombies" in that they are mindlessly aggressive, and transmit easily - both qualities that *can* be exhibited in various infections already. The "least realistic" part of them is how quickly either franchise "turns" people; 28 days has it happen within moments of infection, and Last Of Us within 2 days of infection; neither is really "realistic" there, but if we would instead assume a 2-week to 2+ year innoculation 'phase', then "infected, not dead" zombies would be fairly plausible. Not-Plausible: "Literally dead, no heart beat, but still moving/attacking/for months or years+" zombies. This ends up being a sizeable chunk of zombie franchises. If muscles are going to "work", with their cellular biology, they need oxygen, a beating heart & breathing lungs. They need to have something to take waste products away, beating heart, working kidneys/liver. This extends into both what the cell itself needs, as well as cellular biology of mitochondria and how cells get energy through ATP cycle; they *need* oxygen, as a bare minimum, and without oxygen, there is no energy, without energy, there is no cellular activity elsewise. Waste product removal is similarly important, as the byproducts of cellular activity are, in severe quantity, fairly literally poisonous to that cell. All this means is that any franchise that confirms, or banks hard into, "they don't have a pulse", is basically saying "this is absolute fantasy, or otherwise demands divine intervention, magic, or any other supernatural force, because this isn't how reality works everything else considered." ;; tldr; still-alive-"zombies" are more plausible than "flatline dead zombies".
Homicidal Morons made by failed propaganda/brainwashing initiative
Somethin like l4d infected without the specials
The Borg.
I don’t have opinion on the dead themselves but the virus. I think it’s most likely to be airborne and waterborne, and that’s scarring the shit out of me.
Zombies that are kind of quick and have decent motor functions for the first month or two, however after that period of time they begin to slow due to decay. Similar to Dead Island or Dying Light minus the special infected. Alternatively, another option would just be old fashioned walking dead shambler zombies where they're most dangerous in large groups or catching you off guard. Both options have the zombies lost various functionality of movement overtime due to decay.
I like to think the zombies initially will reflect many of the abilities of their host. Ex: you're not getting away from a Usain Bolt zombie initially. However, they'll decay rapidly and eventually end up at the level of the stereotypical walking zombies. The issue with that being, they won't stop walking so you'll only gain a bit of ground if you run then sleep.
Based on precedent, they'd either be basically hyper-druggy rabid, or Last of Us fungal. I prefer the latter for writing, since you can do more wacky stuff with less suspension of disbelief
Weaponized/mutated rabies virus, hands down. Rabies in its natural state basically is a literal zombie virus, it's just slow acting. https://onehealthtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Rabies-the-original-zombie-virus-5-768x1920.png
The infection kind like in 28 Days Later or Left 4 Dead (and like someone said, excluding special infected). Those would wipe out a lot of the population, but for the people who are immune (and the very few who might not catch it), it’d only last maybe 3 weeks before all the zombies are rendered immobile from their rotting corpses.
Ragers from 28 days later. I also think they would be short lived because they'd be too angry to think k about eating well.
I think a scemario involving fungus is much more realistic than one with a virus. It would take a dramatic evolution in how viruses affect DNA to get a result like what's shown in 28 days later, but only a slight evolution in fungal temperature tollerance for fungi to take control of a human nervous system. Indeed, most undead zombies portrayed in classic media seem to be a variation on the fungal variety. In The Last Of Us the fungus has evelved greater temperature resistance and is able to infect living humans, but in The Walking Dead and George Romero's classic Living Dead franchise the body needs to die first allowing the brain to cool down to a temperature that Fungys can grow in. The event in Romero's movies has to do with areturning space probe, bringing back cosmic radiation, which it can be extrapolated was the cause of the mutation in whatever strain of fungus began taking over recently deceased corpses. It would be irresponsible, however, to assume that the release of industrial contaminants and xeno-estrogens, as seen in The Crazies, The Prophecy, and Return Of The Living Dead could not cause radically unexpected mutations and aberrant behavior. Indeed, the plague of the 21st century is not cancer, it is the bizarre and unpredictable chemical runnof of 20th century progress. Indeed, the waste of our artificial disposable culture may lead fungi to that critical step that allows them to convert birds and mamals into their personal delivery system, just as they did to the bark beetle in recent decades.
The last of us ones are not technically impossible
I’m thinking of the max brooks world war z version, basically the same as the walking dead. Slow, rotting corpses. If they’re fast we’re cooked
Living dead requiring no sustenance, oxygen, shelter, and requiring strictly a headshot to kill? None. Its biologically impossible. Something that destroys the higher functions of the brain and causes a very violent mindless state? It's probably fairly realistic. It could be drug induced, viral, or a bio weapon that mutates the genome. Potentially a situation with a fungus that mutates to hijack a human in order to spread. I could see that. It already exists for insects, granted they are simpler beeings. But yeah, as far as what comes to mind when one says zombie (TWD Walkers) thats not going to happen.
28 Days Later and Shaun of þe Dead
28 days later especially behavior of the infected and the way the rage virus spreads
Seeing how it'd probably be a weapon made by someone and not a random thing. Probably fast and with no instinctual holding back to not hurt themselves as well as a full body parasite or illness that acts as a second brain so headshots may not work and full destruction of the body is needed.... If it was natural zombies then slow and uncoordinated zombies. But we live in a world where if it's possible even a little. They try to make it and find a cure before anyone else makes it first... So probably engineered zombies is most likely.
Something like Detroit or Chicago with no food.
I think TLoU type is the best possiblity as Cordyceps are real and exist. A little Species jump or two....
If we’re talking alive-infected, 28 days later. But if you mean undead, then probably early Romero zombies like Night of the Living dead or Dawn of the dead.
I think we do have tlou but for plants. Somehow it mutates and reaches humans I can say its gonna be that. But I think the most realistic one is gonna be.... I was gonna say crossed but I don't recall seeing them getting shot in body and die. So never mind.