The year is 2018, and the popularity of the brain eating creatures who we have come to know as zombies have died down. There have been many movies and shows depicting these creatures and have had many people believe that there will be a zombie apocalypse in the future, including students right here at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB).
Zombie culture was a big topic of conversation from 2009 to 2013. In those four years it was almost impossible to find something that wasn’t zombie themed. From the creation of the television hit series The Walking Dead, to the love story and film Warm Bodies, to the gaming app Plants vs Zombies.
The dead coming back to life was very popular and, for some, a very real fear. I am not going to lie to you, I might have been one of those people scared of the dead rising again. However, as time passed and zombies weren’t talked about as much, many people stopped fearing them because they weren’t relevant anymore.
But I began to wonder, How many people still thought that zombies were scary? This turned into me talking to my friends and family about the topic of zombies where I was met with a lot of backlash saying that “Zombies aren’t real”.
When you google “Are zombies real?” You get a couple different articles on disease and a disturbing video of a man being shot while on bath salts. This didn’t answer my question, and it made me ponder even more questions I had.
So I settled with this. How many CSUMB students believe that a “Zombie apocalypse style” end of the world could potentially happen? I really wanted to know how many people my age really believed that the dead could rise again and bring an end to the world as we know it.
This led me to collect some numbers. I surveyed a few different classes, with a very precise form of data collection. I had the students close their eyes and raise their hands to answer these two questions.
Do you think that a Zombie apocalypse could potentially happen? Or, do you think that a Zombie apocalypse could never happen?
After surveying a few classes with a total of 50 people asked I ended up with these statistics.
26% of the students surveyed believed that it was in fact possible for a zombie apocalypse to end the world.
“Yes. it is totally possible. Because we live in a generation where everything is genetically modified. And everything is animal tested. Did you know that scientists inject animals with diseases and then test their antidotes on them?” Ryan Hernandez, a believer in the potential zombie uprising, believes that this is possible.
Hernandez shared that he answered yes because of the testing that the Center for Disease Control does on animals that they expect to translate to humans. Hernandez said that there are two tubes of the small pox diseases that the CDC keeps doing tests on, he believes that it would be very easy for something to go wrong in that process and end up with zombies.
Hernandez also doesn’t believe that the human race is prepared for a new disease to spread and that people would die very easily.
“People should be prepared for emergencies, but at this point with the technology we have, no one is. No one is prepared to survive without electricity and technology anymore. Hell would break loose if we no longer had access to wifi, what makes people think they could survive zombies?” said Jessica Blaylock another CSUMB student.
“The real question isn’t is this something that could happen, but rather when this happens what are we going to do?” Along with studying at CSUMB, Blaylock is training to become an EMT and hopes that people take care and prepare for emergencies such as these.
Many students that I interviewed said that they don’t believe that the dead will rise again and kill all of us but 60% believed that a disease could end the world as we know it.
