I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Dear Kiddorambo; You are asking ‘I Am Legend’, just like ‘I’m a Scientist’?
It could be and if it ever happen, it will be very interesting!
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@Soon…..it’s a movie about a virus that turns people into vampires….
what a question…
I personally think there could be a situation like the I Am Legend movie. Viruses can mutate and cause all sorts of misery. Just remember the swine flu that literally swept the world, infecting heaps of people and causing a lot of death.
I believe that a virus can affect your brain and turn you into a different person, but hunting and eating other people…..unlikely. But then again, I have read stories where some people high on party drugs start attacking and biting other people, so you never know….
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The 2007 movie ‘I Am Legend’ was based on a book from 1954 by the same name. I’ll focus on the movie, since you’re probably more familiar with it than the book, or the other adaptations.
In the movie, 90% of the human population is infected and/or killed by a mutated virus, originally designed as a cure for cancer. This is a pandemic, as we’ve discussed a bit already . We have seen pandemics in the past that have caused high mortality, so it is not impossible that a sufficiently strong virus, with defenses against our modern medical treatments, could cause a very high level of death. As in the movie, some people would probably be naturally immune, and thus survive.
In the film, the infected are said to have incredibly hyperactive adrenal glands, so they are producing huge amounts of adrenalin all the time. Think about a time when you have been scared or surprised suddenly: your heart beats really fast, you hyperventilate, you probably feel like you have a lot of excess energy so you could run away. These are all effects of adrenalin. A bit like drinking way too much caffeine all the time. It’s going to have some rather nasty side-effects, but probably not to the extreme that is shown. (On a side note, I’m fairly certain that the zombie/vampire hybrids in I am Legend are different from other movies in the same area, in that the infected aren’t actually reanimated dead, as they can be cured. Therefore, maybe slightly more plausible than other zombie movies, though still unlikely).
Another part of the film that was scientifically plausible is the way that nature begins taking over the city once the people have gone, but that probably has less to do with your current question than the disease itself. 🙂
Perhaps a better example of a pandemic in film is the movie “Contagion”, which was a very accurate description of many of the things that could happen with an outbreak of that magnitude. Less vampires/zombies/explosions, but the science is solid!
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Gah! I had written a long answer to this question, but my browser lost it, and Vanessa has done a great job of answering this anyways. All I would add to her answer is to not lose much sleep worrying about this sort of apocalypse. There’s a lot of things that could go wrong in this world, but zombies or being turned into a monster by aren’t likely to be one of them.
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I can’t really comment on this question since I haven’t seen the Movie “I Am Legend” – but now I’ve read Vanessa’s answer I think my next weekend off I’ll head to the video store to find it 🙂
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