There’s nothing worse when rummaging through the old fridge for a drink and accidentally grab the wrong thing! Like going for some OJ and taking a swig of V8! Bleh!
I keep seeing this “TruMoo” stuff and my first thoughts are always “huh, is this synthetic milk for vampire cows?” For healthy bones and fangs!
So… while on the topic of vampers, why don’t we discuss the possibility of their existence. It seems that ever since there have been Humans scurrying about, there have been stories of vampires! They are amongst the oldest of folklores and regardless of their origin, they share many many similarities. Maybe it’s a “morphic” kind of thing, or just great minds thinking alike, but the fact that these creatures attack humans for their blood, especially in many places where the only closest thing in common is a mosquito, is pretty amazing. You would think that if people all lived separately and isolated, they would come up with different folklore monsters, but it seems certain ones are just hardwired into our collective consciousness.
That said, the science needed to make it work can only be stretched so thin. Like our talk about zombies, there are plenty of things to make a similar effect to the whole “living dead” act. Mortality is just a function of biology. There’s no real reason for mortality, other than the need for evolution, and advances in that direction are taking great strides. But what about the whole blood thing? Well… that’s a difficult one to explain away. The Elder Scrolls folks had an interesting take based on a cursory study by David Dolphin which explained it as a means to treat porphyria by increasing the absorption of some enzyme through the stomach lining (thus in Elder Scrolls you contract porphyric haemophilia). But again, it’s a stretch. Human blood I guess has some fun stuff in it and some suggest that it is this “stuff” specifically that the vampires lack and must take in, such as PCDHY proteins, but still…
So my take… um… other than some mystical essence or a specific protein/enzyme deficiency, I have a hard time rationalizing it beyond something more akin to zombism. Which is totally fine, I mean, you could classify them together, but to me they seem more alike than separate. Take transmission for instance; via bite (aka saliva) or exchange of blood (blood to blood contact), which are very similar to the way zombism is transmitted (aka, similar in effect to rabies). Or improper burials which may be something like an environmental parasite, possibly insecta or fungal. Or the more fun ones say a life of extreme hedonism, which could imply a number of things including sexual transmission and could have ties to something like syphilis which could deteriorate the brain in later stages and cause aggressive behavior or mutation of herpes, which is known to latch onto nerve cells. Immortality is easy… just a few tweeks to the body chemistry and gene structures and there you go, cell replication and repair issues solved. (ok, doing this practically is hard, but in theory a disease could cause an effect similar to that.) Sensitivity to the sun can be caused by a whole host of things, though this is more of a recent incarnation of vampire lore. Garlic is the same way, I mean some is fine but too much and nobody want’s any of that stink! Same with aversion to christian relics, I mean, if you contracted this via hedonistic ways, no one wants to be nagged about it… But blood? Well, again, if the production process in the body is somehow shutdown for whatever it is in the blood, then maybe a few nibbles is all you need! So there you have it, vampirism! Just an offshoot of zombism!
Now what say you?
Ok now im thinking of the female kindred from forsaken world………
lol, that’s Alexander Skarsgard… an easy mistake to make. XD
No what I mean is when you said vampires I thought of kindred and the kindreds chests…..
if someone really wanted to live only another month, they could drink nothing but blood, and be nourished, but diseases really make that hard.
hmm, kinda forgot to add this to the article… oops! but I was going to talk about the real “true blood” I saw in a Hot Topic once… basically it has all the chemical stuff that’s in blood with some cherry flavoring or something like that… anyways, I laughed cause it has like 400% your daily allowance of iron, so if you drank too much of it, you’d probably just die (or at least be very very sick).
same with blood… it’s waaaaaaaaaaaay too high in iron so drinking someone dry would probably make you sick.
Well everyone knows Vampires are myth based on what Ancients told human natives when they ran from Wraith in Pegasus…
But one more thing about immortality- general issue is that our body is incapable of rapairing itself in sufficient manner. Even out current lifespan is stretching it a lot… in fully natural enviroment hominids were lucky to live 20 years… and 30 was actualy “old” near grave not so long ago.
Cancers and other “ilnesses” are nothing more than acumulation of flaws within out bodies. (Not counting people who are just saved by medical science while in nature they would not even survive beeing born- There is definitely corelation between amount of people saved from death prenataly or during birth and people ill before “normal age of illness”)
Sea stars are “immortal” but they are pretty simple lifeform not even close to our complexity.
Perhaps with some regenerative nanotech we could fix our bodies better… but than we crash on same thing Asgard in Stargate did- their brains could not take anymore memories, (the vastly superior intellect), and in milllenia they somehow managed to engenier better brains. (But in Ida they hit wall… in Pegasus they helped themselves with cybernetic augmentations)
Sure Ida Asgard could have used older version of bodies, but that would mean actualy deleting parts of their souls and memories… instead they rather chose to die as they were. Rather than changing to something they considered lesser, nor they wanted to sustain themselves within computers of their ships.
oh man, sadly I knew that reference right away! XD
anyways, there has been a lot of progress in the field of longevity, especially with the idea of immortality. the problem is, like you said, being that we are very complex and a lot of the systems, though they work together to do stuff, are independent for the most part (organs I mean… they have needs from other parts of the body, but they operate as separately… like, factories are organs and the city is the body)
so yeah… getting it all to work together nicely is the real trick. however, the cells themselves can be immortal. the only reason they die off are because of a chemical marker that lets them know they need to decompose. then there are little markers on the dna that say to stop splitting. so remove these two, and you can operate without cell death! buuuuuut you’d probably look like something from Akira…
the fancy trick will be to make sure the body as a whole does NOT send the signal for total system cell death, while making sure individual cells are able to die and reproduce without restriction. in that sense, the body could essentially be shot full of holes and as long as there are sufficient resources available to the cells, they would be able to repair the damage (and until then, they’d just be preserved). there was an interesting study on this a while back… obviously it’s more complicated than just getting a mortality immunization shot, but I think we may be able to achieve very long longevity by tweeking these things… and since it all comes down to biology, those tweeks could come from an external natural source (like a virus that shuts down cell division caps or interferes with the system-wide cell death signals).
also, fun fact, and a little tidbit for Black History Month, a woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks was the first person to have immortal cells used for scientific study! I think the story goes that they were kinda used without her permission, but they’ve used, grown, and reused those same cells from the 1950s in experiments ranging from polio vaccines to testing them in space! talk about a true hero in modern medical science! all done without her knowledge… might be a good topic for a future comic huh? the ethics of research and all that…
ps… asgards should have just made robot bodies like in battlestar! >)
Well Asgard chose not to.
It was the choice of the gods… and well it kind of was what it supposed to be- gods sarcrificing themselves to nail down a threat (though only few dozen Ori ships landing on Orilla) and passing on knowledge to humans who should take their place on ruins of Asgard.
Man has relegated many dark things to myth and legend, happy to think they don’t and never have existed. I don’t know what dark forces have existed or do exist, but I know complacency is dangerous. The 190th Rule of Acquisition is “Hear all, trust nothing.”. Don’t believe in vampires or zombies or Slender Man (from your last strip), but at the very least hear what is said and be mentally ready for it to potentially be true even if you don’t believe it to be true.
Yes, I lead a very paranoid life.
maybe it’s nature’s way of just keeping us on our toes… maybe there are no zombies or vampires or warewolves, but ask ANYONE and they’ll likely know the proper course of action to take care of them!
While biologically possible, I don’t think vampires exist. There are Clinical Vampires, though. They aren’t real vamps, just chumps obsessed with blood who also drink it sometimes(I’m kind of knowledgable about crazies in general).
yeah, of all the mythical creatures, vampires seem to be the least possible to exist. at least, in their current lore incarnation.
I don’t really believe that there are vampires, but if there are any and there’s an understandable explanation, I think I’d just accept it.
I read so much books and play so many games & do other fictional stuff that I’m starting to think one day I’ll go crazy with confusion. :S
meh, there’s weirder stuff in quantum physics than vampires and werewolves, so I don’t think I’d be too shocked about it either.