字幕列表 影片播放 列印英文字幕 Hey Vsauce, I'm Jake and in the incredible game The Last of Us 60% of the global population, 4.25 billion people, more than the entirety of Asia, have suddenly ceased to exist or are just no longer people. And scenarios like this are nothing new, there have been hundreds and hundreds of movies and videogames that cover similar events, but could a pandemic like what is depicted in The Last of Us...actually happen? You only have to go back 95 years to 1918, at the end of World War 1, to witness one of the most deadly and disastrous pandemics in human history: The Spanish Flu. This variety of avian influenza killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people, more than 3 times the amount who died in the actual war, and with a worldwide population at the time of 1.85 billion, it wiped out 3-5% of the entire planet; and that was only in one year. But the flu is a virus that actually exists, and in the work of fiction The Last of Us we are dealing with an organism, a fungus...that also...actually exists. Cordyceps are fungal parasites that infect and take over insects. The most well known being ophiocordyceps unilateralis that infects ants, turning them into zombies. A spore from the fungus enters the ant's body, taking over its brain and controlling its movements. Not too long after, the ant finds a perfect spot to die, the fruiting body of the fungus grows out of the ant's head, and a slew of spores are released onto the unsuspecting ant population. It has been known to decimate entire colonies, but luckily it only infects insects, and it's not like diseases can move from one species to another...well.... An estimated 60% of all modern diseases came from animals, specifically ones that we live in close contact with or have domesticated. From cattle grew measles, tuberculosis and smallpox. From pigs and birds we have the flu. From chimpanzees we have AIDS. All of these started out as infections that couldn't be spread to humans, but after years and years of these microbes being around us, they adapted to our biology. But we don't live in direct contact with ants, and most people don't eat ants, so that's good...but other animals do, and then other animals eat those animals, and at some point on this parasitic food chain lie humans. Considering how diseases mutated and progressed from domesticated animals to us, it isn't too far fetched to think that a fungal infection like this, whose only purpose is to survive long enough to spread, could adapt and evolve to lay claim to the top of that food chain. A great example of a microbe's ingenuity is in Jared Diamond's amazing book 'Guns, Germs and Steel'. Jared talks about the bacterial disease typhus and how it was transmitted to people by going from rat fleas to rats to humans. But after a while, typhus figured out a much easier way to infect us: by cutting out the unnecessary carriers and going directly from human body lice to humans. If a fungal parasite like the Cordycep could infect humans like it does in The Last of Us, how long would it take? One of the biggest differences between the Spanish Flu in 1918 and a modern day pandemic is how connected we are. What would have taken two weeks to go from New York to Germany by boat, can be done in 8hrs on a plane. Using the Global Epidemic and Mobility software and some parameters we know from the game, we can create a model and simulate what the transmission and spread would look like. In about 60 days, the fungal parasite would have infected the majority of the planet. And you know things are bad when not even Madagascar is safe. But that isn't to say that the governments of the world don't have plans in place. Most governments - and the United States in particular - have strategies for biological threats, counterterrorism, and the one that applies to this situation most, The National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza. In it their high estimate for fatality domestically is 2 million, or less than 1% the population of the US. This incredibly detailed 233 page document really drives home one main point, and that is "sustain infrastructure and mitigate impact to the economy and the functioning of society". A virus or disease or parasite doesn't affect power lines, cars, the internet...it affects the people who make those things work. When 60% of the entire population, over 4 billion people, just stop being - when the doctors, the teachers, the mechanics, the mail men vanish, and what we know as society crumbles...all that's left is...the last of us. And as always, thanks for watching.
B2 中高級 我們會是最後的我們嗎? (Could We Be The Last of Us?) 144 6 Jerry Lin 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日 更多分享 分享 收藏 回報 影片單字