Thursday, November 01, 2007
VAMPIRES - ECOLOGICAL VICTIMS
According to all the films vampires are not only incredibly powerful & long lived but able to reproduce themselves at a great rate (theoretically one per night). I have never seen an explanation of why, like Fermi's question about alien civilisations, we are not hip deep in them.
Reading something else about the number of human diseases which we got because we started living by farming animals it struck me vampires must be susceptible to human diseases, since we are so closely related to them, & totally unable to to avoid picking them up in their most energetic form, due to the vampire's total dependence on humanity. Rather as if all eucalyptus bushes suddenly became infected with Koala fever. The Black Death must have come as a worse tragedy to them than to us because they are exposed to so many & such energetic disease vectors (ie suck the blood of so many people). Unlike humans being more long lived they would not have so quickly evolved (we are all descended from generations who survived bubonic plague & earlier, measles which is partly why we survive them now).
They may be impervious to bullets but I have never seen a film where a vampire successfully recovered from the flu.
By the time Vald Tepes (born 1431) became a vampire the entire vampire population must have been down to a handful. Being at the top of the food chain means being at the bottom of the disease chain. Poor creatures.
Reading something else about the number of human diseases which we got because we started living by farming animals it struck me vampires must be susceptible to human diseases, since we are so closely related to them, & totally unable to to avoid picking them up in their most energetic form, due to the vampire's total dependence on humanity. Rather as if all eucalyptus bushes suddenly became infected with Koala fever. The Black Death must have come as a worse tragedy to them than to us because they are exposed to so many & such energetic disease vectors (ie suck the blood of so many people). Unlike humans being more long lived they would not have so quickly evolved (we are all descended from generations who survived bubonic plague & earlier, measles which is partly why we survive them now).
They may be impervious to bullets but I have never seen a film where a vampire successfully recovered from the flu.
By the time Vald Tepes (born 1431) became a vampire the entire vampire population must have been down to a handful. Being at the top of the food chain means being at the bottom of the disease chain. Poor creatures.
