Chapter 44-3: Life and Death

[Gnex]

This story is the timeless classic of Good vs Evil....... Just understand that Good always triumphs!!!

CJ = Evil

Michael = Good

[LiamKerrington]

According to Ed Grabianowski at io9, (not just him obviously) humans have survived near extinctions before.


Now, of course, every school child knows it was the first proto-zombie outbreak.

I think Ink is making a bad thing 1000x worse. Remember, people in the Colony had never seen a behemoth before. The zoms they knew were bad but unorganized. They tended to do random crowd movement type runs. Assuming that Ink isn't one of a cadre with members all over the world--we don't know what's going on everywhere.

In 2003 scientists met and considered the challenges of a multi-generation starship concept. And in these thoughts they considered that a group of roughly around 200 persons would be the lowest end of the bargain, if you wish to uphold diversity in the genepool ... If you like to learn more about it, read this book:
http://books.google.de/books/about/I...AJ&redir_esc=y

The Colonists are far below this.

Even if they meet other survivors - and we already know how bad this may end -, the other group(s) need to be big enough to reach this critical mass ...

Best wishes!
Liam

[LiamKerrington]

This story is the timeless classic of Good vs Evil....... Just understand that Good always triumphs!!!

No. This is a zombocalypse. The good never win.

CJ = Evil

Michael = Good

Even IF CJ is evil, there is worse than that ...

Best wishes!
Liam

[UndeadSweeper]

This story is the timeless classic of Good vs Evil....... Just understand that Good always triumphs!!!

CJ = Evil

Michael = Good

PHASES OF GRIEF

✓ 1. Denial
✓ 2. Anger
✓ 3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

[Merlin1274]

Well as far as we know LA is the only place with ink. So IMO there is a good chance there are larger groups in areas far north or in very remote areas..

[Gnex]

PHASES OF GRIEF

✓ 1. Denial
✓ 2. Anger
✓ 3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

Boooo!!!! and Booo on KC for the Like!!!!

And technically..... I would still be at #2...... Anger at CJ!!!!

[Jannit]

Well as far as we know LA is the only place with ink. So IMO there is a good chance there are larger groups in areas far north or in very remote areas..

There could be other areas with characters similar to Ink. Some sort of regional overlord of the zombies or something within hierarchy of zombie politics. At the head of it all is the grand master overlord responsible for it all! Muahahaha.

Or maybe the rest of the world is fine and has quarantined North and South America to stop the spread.

[Witch_Doctor]

Hope Burt and Riley didn't hear the distress call, and are now heading o the hospital. it's full of zombies!

[Eviebae]

I was thinking along similar lines earlier this evening... about a population bottleneck and the Mount Toba eruption.

Credit where credit is due. I had a vague memory of someone writing something similar. Guess who that was? YOU! I wonder if KC was talking about your post when he said someone had figured out a chunk of it.

Here it is again:

(Hey, nikvoodoo, as verbose as I tend to be and I am about to get, I'm horrible at properly titling. So feel free to re-title this appropriately.)

Alright everyone, I have been going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole off and on for the past week or so and spent the better part of the day today putting this together and I think I've nailed it. A decent theory of the underlying cause and how it worked.

Attachment 2400

Hold on to your hats everyone, I'm about to get overly sciency up in here!

The only good way for me to get this out of my head effectively is to do so chronologically and start from the beginning. So lets get started.

• Hadean Eon: 4567.17 - 4000 million years ago which was followed by the
• Archean Eon: 4000 - 2500 million years ago and the period of
• Late Heavy Bombardment that straddled the end of the Hadean and the beginning of the Archean

(When I said beginning, I wasn't BS'ing. Here's a more comprehensive timeline.)

From the Hadean article, which echoes pretty much everything I had previously learned about the formation of the earth:

No sense in retyping it, I'll quote it instead. It says everything I wanted to. However, one theoretical vector worth mentioning is Panspermia with Extremophiles. Bombardment might have brought life to Earth on stellar debris or, Earth might have been a source of life in that the bombardment might have taken Hadean or Archean Proto-life with it on ejecta thrown into space... (I'll be coming back to that later.)

After the Archean Eon was the

• Proterozoic Eon: 2500 - 541 million years ago (That end date range will be important soon.)

Now, this is a a bit of an oversimplification, but for the majority of the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, life was simple... single celled life that sometimes organized into colonies. For 3.5 Billion years that is all that life did. Be Boring. Then something changed. What?

• The Cambrian Explosion, around 530 million years ago.

But why the sudden explosion and diversification of life? Was there something to it? I posit that there was something holding it back. The Zombie Plague. Walk the dog with me here and I'll explain. (Bear with me, I might get a bit disjointed as I jump around and start getting into conjecture.)

Throughout the history of the Earth there have been Extinction Level Events. The chart at that link shows the pattern of ELE since the Cambrian explosion, but what is to say that they weren't happening before then too? They probably were, we just have no fossil record of them.

From the Bacteria Page:


Despite the simplicity of the life present, I'm sure it was diverse, but not homogeneous. It is likely that certain species of bacteria were specific to certain biomes then, as they are now.

I further conjecture that the "Zombie" Plague is a bacteria, or a bacteria like organism and an Extremophile. As we know it is hostile to other forms of life... Keeping other forms of life "in check," periodically killing off life in ELE's as their proliferation ebbed and flowed with time. Therefore it was at some point removed from the Earth's surface in order to allow the Cambrian Explosion to occur.

How would this be possible without its eradication? I have previously mentioned Sequestration, and I think I have figured out how.

• The Farallon Tectonic Plate has suggest to me how it might be possible.

The Farallon plate was one of the many tectonic plates that were present when Pangaea broke up during the Jurassic. I say was, because it is gone. The Pacific plate pushed it into North America and it subducted. The funny thing is that it is still kinda there, breaking up as it floats about in the Mantle under North America..

I therefor suggest that the biome that the "Zombie Plague Bacteria" was present in was on a plate that subducted "shortly" before the Cambrian Explosion. The sequestration of the plague allowed the explosion to take place. That plate broke up into large chunks and through the process of Mantle Convection, those chunks spread across the globe, under the surface of the tectonic plates, carrying with them pockets of viable ZPB Extremophiles. There, for over a half a Billion years, the E-ZPB waited just below the surface. At vents, mid-ocean ridges, volcanoes and fault lines, this debris accumulated until it was somehow released, releasing E-ZPB back into the world.

I will admit though, one of the main places this theory falls down is how/why was the release nearly simultaneous at the global level?


As an interesting aside, I mentioned that Earth could have been a source for Panspermia... It has been suggested that the Zombie Plague killed the dinosaurs. The current belief is that the Chicxulub Crater Impact 65 million Y/O was what did them in with the K-Pg extinction event... However, there is some preliminary evidence that something was already killing them off. Some sort of disease. Also, there is increasing evidence that the ELE wasn't caused by a singular event, that it was the culmination of multiple impacts. One or more of these may have been ejecta from an Hadean/Archean impact and brought E-ZPB back to Earth or released it from below the surface...


(Alright, I'm done. I'm going cross-eyed and getting a headache still looking at this.)

[UndeadSweeper]

Hope Burt and Riley didn't here the distress call, and are now heading o the hospital. it's full of zombies!

Hopefully, they can see and/or hear the copter pass by, since I'm guess there not much noise to block it out. If not, we get another describe of Treehemoth on the ground account.