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But I was wondering if you might be interested in editing in a document I am formulating about some outbreaks of SCP 008 prior to containment. This would also include SCP 008's "name" as well as a picture of its chemical structure if i can find it.
Dr. Fineas Waldorf Steal
It shouldn't, because in the foundation universe, it's easy to contain a zombie outbreak.
pastarasta1 is quick-talking and often scheming
first of all, please dont hate me for necroing
isn't this just a zombie virus ported into the SCP universe?
writing standards have obviously improved since this article
i agree as a spartan who has seen the flood Parasite first hand
So scp 008 is like the flood parasite
Have subjects of SCP-008 been exposed to fluid of SCP-006 as of yet? If so, I believe it would be of great interest, and should be appended to this entry, and the entry for SCP-006.
Ok, here goes nothing.
Why is this Keter?
Containment procedures aren't very thorough at all, and it's pretty fucking hard to screw up freezing something and shoving it into an underground bunker. The definition that seems to be gathering momentum among the senior staff is the "containment difficulty" one, and containing 008 barely costs anything. Under the current definition it fulfills the whole "kill everybody" criteria but doesn't have the "containment protocols must be extensive, involved, and precisely followed in order to prevent it from doing so" one.
Well, it does pass as safe under Quik's locked box test, but since this error's been around for a couple years, we could still keep it in at least just to make it sound scary/dangerous.
SCP-008 fails the locked box test because it is not fully contained. Samples are more or less confirmed to exist in Russia, and it's implied that there are occasional outbreaks in various parts of the world that have to be swiftly dealt with. Basically, it's Keter because for the time being containment is based on reacting to it's threat, not the other way around.
Even 682 and 076 can only kill 1-3 people at a time. If 008 ever got loose, it would kill everybody.
It wouldn't though. Isolated populations would escape, and somebody would have immunity, coz that's how viruses work. There is even one documented case of someone surviving rabies without treatment.
Ending modern technological civilisation is pretty good going though.
Isolated populations would escape…
Possibly. Submarines, Antarctica, EXTREMELY isolated locations, etc.
…and somebody would have immunity, coz that's how viruses work.
No, that's how all the viruses we've encountered up until now work. We know that because THEY haven't wiped out humanity. It only takes ONE to be 100% lethal to really not have to worry about anything else.
It's sort of like "Why is it that you find your keys in the last place you look? (Because after you find them, you stop looking!)" taken up to eleven.
Besides - this virus modifies the host to actively try to spread itself. You DID read the bit where it turns them into zombies, right?
The bit that is lifted directly from 28 days later? Yeah, I caught that.
Uh, what bit was lifted? I admit to having seen it, but I don't think I referenced it.
(Read that your comment wrong three times trying to figure out where the hell I quoted the movie.)
Actually that's been out there a LONG time in zombie movies - the '60s or '70s. (I haven't watched too many '50s zombie movies, those ones are usually magic zombies instead of science zombies.)
As to the science bit, in a six billion population, there is enough genetic variety to ensure that somebody is able to to survive virtually any possible virus, either through factors that prevent contraction in natural environments, or through ability to recover from symptoms. Other people are just lucky and never catch it. And zombies as described would probably not even be enough to take over rural areas of the US.
The thing is, this isn't just another virus. [pedantry] For one thing, it's a prion. [/pedantry] For another, this is the SCP. We wouldn't be containing these items at all if they didn't bend or outright break the laws of nature as we know them.
Those laws dictate that in six billion people, some resistant alleles exist, and that the disease probably wouldn't spread to rural areas. Okay. They also dictate that a human with blood viscosity so high that he hardly notices gunshot wounds cannot continue to move — his circulatory system is effectively one big useless clot. SCP-008 already breaks natural laws. What's to say it can't have genuine 100% lethality, or spread like wildfire even without an obvious host pool?
I understand where you're coming from, I really do. Browsing through this site frequently forces me to give my inner scientist a couple Valium and a nice lie-down — but I keep reading, and I have fun doing it. You shouldn't have to tell your disbelief to go suck it, but the willingness to suspend it a little bit in the right places is what makes the SCP work.
SCP Wiki Administrator | Earth: We're all in this together.
Also, there is a virus that, so far as we know, has 100% lethality. It's a genetically modified mousepox virus. Scientists altered a gene, hoping to induce sterility in mice. It killed every single mouse that was infected. They had no defense against it. As mousepox is extremely similar to smallpox, this is of obvious concern.
So, yeah, while there's resistance to most diseases we know of, it is not the hard and fast rule we once thought it was.
100%-lethal viruses are uncommon because, in evolutionary time, being 100% lethal meant that hosts had less opportunity to transmit the virus.
With a) modern transportation and b) friggin' zombies, this is less of a problem.
(On a related note, the novel Feed, by Seanan McGuire under the name "Mira Grant", is all about zombie viruses and how to respond to them rationally.)
Well, I see what the pro-article people are saying about suspension of disbelief, I accept 100% contagion as an artifact of the eldritch gods. But the problem with zombies is that they are shit. They move slow, and have to catch someone to transmit the virus. But they also eat people, so they are crap at creating zombies, because many of the zombies they create are not functional.
So we have a disease that can only be transmitted to people who are unlucky enough to cross paths with a zombie, get bitten AND escape their attackers reasonably in tact. It would cause all hell to break loose in the first city it hit, then would be contained within a few days.
The only way to make scary zombies dangerous is to make them fast and non-decomposing (28 days later) or change the method of contagion (The Cell) or both (Quatermass).
Original Romero zombies aren't scary in retrospect, except it was the long dead and there were a LOT of them.
Later ones became more durable, then faster and faster, and with a higher rate of contagion; sometimes they got smarter (door knobs should be zombie proof, damnit!)
So, these could be anywhere on the Daft Punk scale of zombies (Better Faster Stronger Smarter)…
Except according to the article they aren't. I'm really not getting the +33 here, I have to say….
Four out of five Creepy Pasta-farians like zombies.
Seriously, it's not like anything here is more then barely realistic (Half a cat? Literal windows, doors and a NOSE into other worlds? Biblical creatures? A sentient DRAWING? "I am a toaster?")
If you can't suspend disbelief for one of the current standards of horror….
Personally, I feel the Romero zombies (those in Night of the Living Dead in particular) were pretty creepy, more so than most zombie depictions I see today, mainly because they didn't do things that broke my suspension of disbelief all the time (i.e. making squealy pig/weird animal noises impossible for humans to make, being completely bullet proof, among other things).
Anyway, to address Qarim Trablusi, 2 things. 1. 100% infectivity doesn't need to be an artifact of the eldritch gods; measels, for example, has a near 100% infectivity in those susceptible to it (people who haven't been vaccinated), and some diseases have 100% mortality without treatment (i.e. rabies).
2. Depending on the physiology of the zombies and the nature of the pathogen, I think the zombie plague could still be a formidable, population decimating problem even if the resulting zombies were slow, could rot, and had no special physical attributes. I think key to this happening are four things: persistence of the pathogen in the environment with huge resistance to degradation, the ability of the pathogen to be passed through feces (in addition to typical zombie trope routes of infection), the ability of the pathogen to be harbored in other species we have close contact with (especially birds, mice, cockroaches, or livestock!) causing no/attenuated pathology, and the incubation period of the pathogen being variable (from days to weeks or even months/years). The pathogen being airborne would be a plus, though it would go against the typical zombie trope.
Say the zombie plague was like scrapie in that it is resistant to degradation (as in, resisting high amounts of radiation, heat < 600+ degrees C, strong acids, bleach, etc… scrapie is scary shit!), can be passed through poop, and is harbored in domestic/common animals. It could persist for a very long time in the countryside as well as in a city, and could pass rapidly through the water supply if enough people get infected and poop into the sanitation system. One could be infected by interacting with an infected animal, not even needing to be bitten or anything (licked by an infected dog, milking an infected cow, stepping on infected bird poop and carrying it into the house, etc.). If the incubation period were variable and could be somewhat long (like a few weeks or months), large amounts of people could get infected and disseminate it and not even know it, until a certain time hits, and, boom, hundreds of zombies. In an urban center, this could be catastrophic and spread easily. Even with a short incubation period, if the infected are ambulatory (and zombies are!), then the infection could still spread fast. Hmmm…
You really don't get Romero slow-style zombies, the thing that makes them lethal/frightening is that they are utterly and completely fucking relentless, World War Z really carries this across.
You can run faster, but you get winded. They don't.
You can hide, but you need food and water. They can go hungry for a looong time.
You can fight, but they're hard to kill, and soldiers get scared. Soldiers have their morale break, can retreat and flee and panic. They don't. They never get scared. They will always chase you, no, they will only ever chase you. That's all they'll ever do.
That post was over a year and a half ago. Please check the dates on posts before responding.
if your reading this your gay
Viruses can't be 100% lethal, then it doesn't work as a virus. It has to spread. If it kills the host, then that breaks the point of the virus, which is to proliferate. Alongside this, 100% lethality is physically impossible, give your immune system some credit, it's been around the block for literally all of human history, it's learned how to do its job.
Lethal viruses aren't lethal because they want to be or because it's an effective strategy, diseases that are lethal are lethal because they aren't made for humans. They're made for a different animal, a different biology, and so their attempts to hijack your system kill you. Every epidemic, plague, etc. all come from animals: HIV and AIDs(Monkeys, some say Chimps), Swine Flu(pigs), rabies(juries out chief), Avian flu(birbs), Antrax(Grazing animals, sheep, goats, cows, etc.), I could go on, but I'd just be spitting wiki after this.
Why do viruses guarantee immunity(not as you postulate, only the ones we know)? Well, because that how humans develop immunity.
It's not so much that's how viruses work as that's how your immune system works. Each of us builds millions of B Lymphocytes each of whom has hundreds of membrane-bound antibodies each perfectly tailored to an antigen. Viruses will always have some kind of hallmark and should a B Lymphocyte find one that matches, it'll mass copy and go Hunter-Killer on that virus. Oversimplifying and skipping some stuff but yeah.
DFTBA
Recall why a sample is contained rather than just incinerated. There's the possibility that some lab, somewhere, could accidentally produce the stuff, and once an outbreak starts, it spreads FAST. 008 may not be able to just randomly breach containment on its own, but if there is a breach and/or outbreak, it's a Very Bad Thing.
Do we still need that "LEVEL 4 CLEARANCE REQUIRED" note at the top? It feels like a leftover from earlier days of the project.
despite the formatting anomaly it represents, I think it's just fine where it is. this certainly isn't the only article to deviate fom the standard layout like that.
I actually like the formatting anomaly in this case.
If this prion is of similar size to PrP, the real-world Prion Protein. then "synthesis" is not a danger as implied by the picture caption, unless the SCP universe includes radically superior peptide synthesis technology than the current state of the art. The upper practical limit of completely synthetic peptides is around 30 amino acids, these days, and does not promise to get much larger anytime soon. PrP weighs in at 253 AA.
The gene that codes for SCP-008 might be spliced into a bacterium and "expressed" by raising large cultures of the modified bacteria. The SCP-008 protein might then be extracted from the cultures. But there's more to proteins than just their AA sequences. There's also "post translational modification" which happens at various points along the natural protein biosynthesis process, and even if a culture could be raised that expressed the SCP-008 perfectly on a primary amino acid sequence level, it still might not function as the infectious protein because the culture system might not correctly fold the protein or perform other post-translational modifications.
Anyway, point being: Just displaying the ribbon diagram or even actually publishing the amino acid sequence of SCP-008 really would not present a significant threat since it would be difficult to the point of impossibility to reproduce the infectious material just with that information. As with real-world PrP, the only way to mass-produce SCP-008 would be to get your hands on some that already exists and culture it. Still, you might err on the side of caution and redact the AA sequence anyway. But there really is no danger of "synthesis."
Suggest caption read: "Ribbon diagram illustrating SCP-008 tertiary structure. Primary amino acid sequence has been redacted."
Thanks for enduring my pedantry.
Cheers-SMR
A good change, but, in the future, ASK before you edit articles.
Admin, SCP Wiki
I did. Last night. In chat.
So in this case, who should I have asked, and exactly where and how should I have asked him or her? My understanding is that the original author of this post is "long gone."
Sorry if I've missed the editing protocol somewhere. Is this covered in a FAQ someplace?
You're correct, the author isn't really around anymore. However, if you'll check the Newbies Guide (under "editing levels"), you'll see the person to ask in this case would be a mod or admin. If you can't find one in chat, you can always send us a PM via wikidot.
From a discussion with Voct about SCP-774 I thought I'd take a look at this again…
Tineye doesn't recognize it, but it's obviously a protein. Possibly some kind of carrier protein, or maybe a folding chaperone, but I'm only saying that because of the symmetrical cavity at the center. Or maybe it's part of a selective membrane, I don't really know.
That's really all I can say based on this image. We can see the quaternary structure, we can pretty much see the tertiary structure, if you know what to look for you can kind of see the secondary structure, and there's no way to see the primary structure at all — plus, of course, there's the conformation; no way of knowing how many possible misfolds there are for something this size (the numbers are quite literally more than astronomical), and even a misfold may still be valid.
Finally, we have no indication whatsoever as to its function or origin.
As for whether it reminds anyone else of Christmas - it's primarily green and red, and its shape is evocative of a wreath. So… no, you must be hallucinating.
It's a memetic effect. Now we need microscopic telekill hamster balls.
if your reading this your gay
I keep forgetting the "/sarcasm".
if your reading this your gay
Okay I know this is necro'd but Google Images found a smaller version of the image on this website, named "test3.png". Perhaps the image was generated as a test from whatever computer program or services DbBrowser offers?
Now who doesn't like Zombies. Upvoted the second I saw it!
I don't. I dislike zombies in general, and this gives me no reason to revise that assessment. It is a zombie virus without any sort of twist or any attempt to rise above "this makes you into a zombie." -1
Wish it was longer. Oh well, it's an old article. No changing it now unless you want to make a Foundation tale.
(account deleted)
