I was watching one of the Resident Evil movies the other day.  It doesn’t matter which.  The plot is pretty static.  Milla Jovovich fights zombies and corrupt corporate zombie-makers.  Anyway, while watching I noticed that the Resident Evil zombies are very fast.  At least as fast as living humans.  Certainly, they are much faster than the “brains, brains” zombies of my youth.  To be fair, everything moved slower in those days.  Take Jason Vorhees, for example.  He only fast-walked his victims down.  His strides were very long, but still he was a creature who knew how to smell the roses while he massacred people.

The thing with zombies (be they fast or slow) is that they really shouldn’t be that much of a problem.  I know, some are more frightening than others (like those teeth clacking zombies in the Tom Cruise movie).  Even so, they are pretty much single-minded automatons.  How difficult would it be to round them up and then obliterate thousands at a time?  The answer is not difficult at all.  In fact, in many zombie worlds they are already milling around in mass quantities.  Just bomb the hell out of them or take a tank and mash them to pieces.  I watched Fury.

“Guten tag, zombie bastards.”

A good zombie eradicator could probably destroy a thousand zombies a day.  And maybe there are hundreds of millions of zombies, but they still have a finite number.  Moreover, one can assume that zombies who cannot find brains will, after a time, fall over from malnutrition.  At the very least, their legs will become so damaged that they will become, for all intents and purposes, inert as carrots.  If carrots had rotting flesh and could make simple, guttural utterances.

“I taste much better with peas,” says the zombie carrot.  I’ll name him Howard.  Howard, the zombie carrot.  Also a good band name.  And, if there is one thing the world needs right now, it is some good band names.  Come on, Millenials.  How hard is it?  Where is the next “Toad the Wet Sprocket?”  I’ll even settle for a “Flock of Seagulls” at this point.

So, you get rid of all the zombies concentrated in the cities and 90 percent of your problem is eliminated.  The stragglers could be phased out over time by squads led by zombie-sniffing dogs.  Dogs can learn to sniff anything.  Really, the zombie is a pretty pedestrian threat.  Low tech, disorganized, single-minded.  Kind of like Evangelicals without the bad hair and make-up.

Conversely, alien invaders are a much more sinister potential threat.  In fact, if a real alien invasion took place we would quickly become slaves or food (depending on the flavor of the alien).  If you think technological superiority isn’t important, ask the American Indian.  Ghost dances and arrows wouldn’t do much against laser beams shot from twenty miles away.  On the other hand, if we were able to make friends with the aliens (we could be the Lenny to the alien George), a death ray would come in mighty handy in dealing with loose zombies.

This should not get your hopes up, however.  If aliens are anything like human beings, their intentions will be purely selfish and unlikely to bode well for our future.  And, as I mentioned, we would be powerless to stop them.  Movies like Independence Day are the psychological equivalent of whistling past the graveyard.  If you look up one day and see the Mothership, it is curtains for all of us.

There will be nothing we can do or say to save ourselves.  My personal last words?

“I taste much better with peas.”

Leave those alien bastards laughing, if nothing else.