Essay by Eric Worrall
You know it had to happen – but the one scene explaining the problem was caused by global warming is entertaining nonsense.
The fungus zombies in ‘The Last of Us’ are fictional, but real fungi can infect people, and they’re becoming more resistant
Published: February 24, 2023 8.32am AEDT
Gerry Wright
Professor of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, McMaster UniversityMany of the people watching The Last of Us are likely there for the zombies.
I love the zombies too, but I’m really there for the fungus.
I’ve been studying fungi since my PhD work in the 1980s, and I grow more fascinated by these amazing organisms with every passing year.
In the HBO series and the video game that inspired it, a parasitic fungus — a fictitious mutation of the very real cordyceps — jumps from insects to humans and quickly spreads around the world, rendering its victims helpless to control their thoughts and actions. Far-fetched fungal fear-mongering? It’s definitely fictional, but maybe not as preposterous as it might seem.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/the-fungus-zombies-in-the-last-of-us-are-fictional-but-real-fungi-can-infect-people-and-theyre-becoming-more-resistant-200224
There is a grain of truth in their yarn. Cordyceps infects mostly insects, taking control of their actions and causing them to help the fungus complete its reproductive cycle – finally sprouting through the body of the insect. Don’t click the link unless you have a strong stomach.
So what caused these Cordyceps to start infecting people? The opening scene of the first episode explains Cordyceps developed the ability to attack humans, because global warming helped the fungus to adapt to our body heat.
And then – no more global warming references. At least so far. The characters in the story have bigger problems. Just a fast moving horror film, entertaining junk food for the brain.
I’m going to keep watching. Lets hope I don’t regret my recommendation.
Well, they blame everything else on global warming.
I don’t see Michael Mann as a fungi.
A mold, a parasite, a cockroach ?
I see what you did there.
Fun Guy.
Singular . fungus
(At least I hope there is only one of him)
Perhaps the Mann suffers from Plur-itis. The end of his name is certainly repetitious.
No, he’s that insect from NZ that can “die” and “return to life” on a seasonal cycle.
Climate change causes everything bad, or so they say. So welcome to the fringe of reality. Enjoy the show.
Well, they do need something very big to replace guns and smokes in Hollywood scripts and financing.
CAGW is the reason that humans flee Earth in the SciFi series The Ark also. The mention oceans boiling off, birds and insect and plant life dying, the Ozone disappearing . It doesn’t really have to do with what is happening on the ship, but just another example of leading people to believe that could happen anytime soon.
Yep but in this case I can’t make up my mind if it is parody or not. My wife says John Hannah, the actor who played the cigarette smoking scientist in the video above, is a raving green, so who knows.
“raving green”
Is there any other kind?
“oceans boiling off” – imagine what would have to happen before that could happen.
Well for a start, no animal or human would ever see it if it did.
Yep, atmospheric temps would need to reach water boiling point…100C or 212F. Not much life survives to see that temperature. Of course it could also happen by drastically reducing atmospheric pressure and again not much survives to see it either way
That or… they may imagine another scenario, the removal of most of the mass of the atmosphere, maybe with a gigantic vacuum cleaner from outer space.
MegaMaid
If AlGore were to suddenly vanish, that would create a huge vacuous zone. Hmmm probably not considering that particular zone is already vacuous
Al Gore has already seen it!
Just imagine all that ready cooked lobster waiting for us……
Reminds me of that perfect summation of the “climate” bullshit by an unfortunately unnamed geologist…
“If CO2 could do what they say it can do, then the oceans would have boiled away or frozen over a long time ago.”
A different cordycepts fungal mutation apparently already evolved to infect warmunists, making them impervious to reality. Zombie like adherence to failed predictions and failed ‘solutions’. Good thing there isn’t a real climate problem, because we have no comprehensive ‘problem’ solutions.
ROFL 🙂
what we can say for sure is that it has caused all the climate alarmists aka useful idiots to lose all common sense – if they ever had any
” because global warming helped the fungus to adapt to our body heat.”
How much are we allowed to swear on this forum?
If that was the case, then it would have happened long ago in places that regularly exceed the average human core temp.
I totally miss old sci-fi and horror movies where the antagonist or disaster is caused by aliens, radiation or humans messing with nature (and I don’t mean phony stuff like “climate change”). For the latter, movies like “The Fly”, and of course the predecessor of all such films, Frankenstein. But sadly today scientists in film and tv are seen as far from evil but rather are gods and saviors. This is about as bad as back in the day when scientists were “mad”…. Scientists are just people, and like everyone else, some have nefarious notions, some are ignorant, many perform for money and some are genuinely altruistic.
BTW, haven’t seen this new show, but I watch very little tv today. I hate wasting my time on “woke” garbage as so much ends up being just that. I’d rather go back and watch the old stuff. If I end up turning something off, it is because it’s boring, not because it’s “woke’.
Tom Clancy, author of The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears, and the super spy character Jack Ryan, also wrote Rainbow 6, in which the antagonists are radical greens plotting to depopulate the Earth with a militarised virus.
So far no Hollywood movie…
Soon they will re-write Tom Clancy to allow of “woke” viewing !
They are already doing it to several writers.. eg Ian Fleming…
Eric
Since Covid-19 hit I’ve been telling everyone to read Rainbow 6. It was eerily prescient.
But it was the vaccine to the Ebola-like virus that was going to depopulate the Earth.
And I loved Clancy’s ending for the back-to-nature eco-terrorists. Quite appropriate!
Ah yes, the vaccine was a fake, a slow acting version of their virus which infected people and made them sick.
Maybe someone in China read “Rainbow 6″…
And no movie based on Michael Crichton’s State of Fear either. Strange that.
I just finished binge watching Babylon 5 on TUBI.
It’s not all a wasteland.
Thrush, Athletes foot, Vaginal yeast infection and then the best one when yeast sets up housekeeping in the stomach producing alcohol. Fungus has already got our number however it seems to stay away from the immune system. Probably because we defend against it pretty well when we are healthy. If by some unlikely method it can overcome our immune system, I suspect it’s not likely to be very contagious and will be easy to contain.
Eric, I don’t know how far you have watched the episodes so far, but the last one my missus made me sit through was an hour of my life I’m never going to get back.
[PLOT SPOILER] I’m not expecting the next episodes to blame global warming for the gay attraction / curiosity between the teenage girls, but I would not be at all surprised if the old GW didn’t didn’t get a passing mention again.
Yeah, I hear you, not every episode is a raving wow. But there are some really good ones, and so far at least I haven’t had an uncontrollable urge to reach for the sick bucket.
As I live in Calgary it’s fun looking for sets I recognize
I pointed out the AGW thing on here after the first episode, but you’re right there have been no more references and they even still have snow and winter.
So that’s something
I deleted my comment on episode 4, an hour of homosexuality that adds not one second to the plot line. Not one second.
Next week: Preacher Joe will explain how Noah got drunk and naked trying to seduce his grandson. Marina Abramovitz will serve menstrual wine and cock&tail sausages containing Sean Penn’s DNA. Bring the children, there will be a matinée performance by the Tripple-Dee Bra Bro’s.
P.S. Bro’ is short for brother, say brah. Also: Yo’ mama be a ho’, not a hoe.
Humh … CliSciFi says that cold places will warm and warm places not so much. Where are these temperature-opportunity-fungi supposed to develop? Its already hot in much of the world.
It’s hot enough in my part of the world. Like I said, nonsense.
Yeah, but it is a dry heat where I am; Las Vegas. Fungi don’t like it here. Now, in Vietnam every fungus in the world took hold.
My home town is on the Queensland coast, so more on the Vietnam end of the heat / humidity spectrum….
I’m more like an old lizard (my skin shows it) in that I like the dry desert heat.
why is it ALWAYS a side by side?
My head is now swimming with the Pink Floyd lyric:
“Hello hello hello, is there anybody in there,
Is there anyone at home…..
…
There is no pain, you are receding,
A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon
Over 50 years ago, my school had a ‘book club’. Once you’d bought membership, you could buy one book per month for ‘next-to-nothing’
One month, I came home with this
We all know that smell, it is Coumarin and features in some VERY expensive perfumes – and is otherwise truly scary stuff.
Turns up in plants all over the place (Red Clover is a good source) = just one of many good reasons why not to eat them.
The fungal thing is happening already and has done since forever – every last one of us has a belly full of Candida Albicans, among others.
With a healthy diet containing proper nutrition, our immune system keeps it under control and we’re never any the wiser. We did evolve in a world full of the stuff after all.
But fungi, in common with every other living thing, Fungi Love Sugar.
So if we eat a diet high in sugar and low in nutrition (which we all do, we have no other choice) – the fungi inside of will go crazy.
(Just one of the things that happens is that the single celled fungi (yeasts) turn that sugar into alcohol. Right there inside our own intestines we all have a mini-brewery)
A very significant problem with Candida Albicans is that it produces a metabolite, waste product, very similar to Wheat Gluten
And Gluten, member of the Lectin Family of plant proteins, has got to be the most hideous stuff evah for driving your immune system crazy.
(Lectins being another major reason not to eat plants)
Now you see why Ivermectin seemed to have ‘beneficial effects’ when given to Covid patients.
Not only did it clear out the parasites and worms that many people are full of (if you keep any sort of pet, you have worms) but Ivermectin is also antifungal. It knocked back the fungi inside your digestive tract.
It is a very lovely and elegant picture once you start putting it together.
But, due to its size, Zombies are unable to grasp it.
A lot like Climate in fact – its sooooo very big that starving, parasite infected zombies simply cannot see it nor do they even want to. Despite all their fine words
So the film, in a roundabout way is correct although as per usual, Cause and Effect are mangled.
It is that eating sugar will cause what they’re on about (fungal overgrowth eating us) but it is the growing & production of all that sugar which is changing the climate.
And the sugar itself makes it massively worse in that it comes with none of the protective nutrition elements we’d get from eating our proper diet.
The story is coming true – it is happening now.
It was predicted.
How interesting – very similar in some ways to two other books about diseases which target women, like The Screwfly Solution, about an alien attempt to wipe out humanity which turns men into murder psychos, and Frank Herbert’s “The White Plague”, about a genetic engineer driven insane by the loss of his family in an IRA attack, who decides the entire world should share his pain.
Ah, the fun of learning science from story books…
But you’re a Floyd fan, I’ll let you go.
Ah, but it is correct that a pernicious parasite has infected a large proportion of humankind! However it’s not a fungus, it is a rash of idea pathogens that have infected the minds and act like biological parasites. Gad Saad’s book “The Parasitic Mind” and his countless talks and posts lampooning this descent into the abyss of infinite lunacy are legendary. Here he is pointing out the absurdity of all things attributed to climate change:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHDe9UD8C4Q
(Climate Change and the Allure of Faux-Causality (THE SAAD TRUTH_1498))
Somehow this fungi mutation didn’t take place during WARMER periods in the past.
If a little higher temperature could cause all of that, we’d have been extinct before modern human civilization.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/attack_of_the_mushroom_people
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the original video game indicated that the fungus was modified by humans and escaped from the lab. Gee, I wonder why they wouldn’t want to use that premise for the show…
I notice the series started out with pretty good sci fi content. But already they are filling episodes with low cost mundane (presumed to be deep & touching) conversation leaving little time for more costly sci fi content/ action/scenes.
The Walking Dead took that maneuver and it ruined the series. IMO
Animal attacks on humans to surge as climate change forces a battle for living space
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41084899.html
The “Last of Us” is the Organic, Non-GMO version of The Walking Dead. 🙂