Viral campaigns have been a marketing tool studios have been going to more often, but Fox has taken the viral more literally this time around for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
First, there were people dressed in hazmat suits outside San Diego Comic Con handing out these to protect the attendees.
While all attendees should be using hand sanitizer to avoid any sickness, that wasn’t want the company had in mind for these. When following the URL on the bottom of the item, users were greeted with this video and the horrifying statistics about the Simian Flu.
– YouTube
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You can visit SimianFlu.com if you want to read more about the disease, or you could wait until Dawn of the Planet of the Apes comes to theaters July 18, 2014.
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So, if I’m guessing correctly, the apes are able to take over in part because humans die out in sufficient numbers due to simian flu.
But if the flu has a 90% mortality rate, that would still leave over 700 million human beings, or, about the population of the planet around about the 17th or 18th century (the population didn’t cross 1 billion until about 1804). Do the math: 99% mortality would leave 70 million, 99.9 would leave 7 million, 99.99 would leave 700,000, 99.999 would leave 70,000, and that’s still more than existed when the population crashed about 65,000 years ago.
This is what kind of annoys me about fictional plagues: writers forget that there are a LOT of human beings on this planet. We’re practically on par with insects and bacteria, i.e., there being so many of us that coming up with a scenario that would kill everyone is really, really hard.
If you want to do this right, set the story a few hundred years in the future; if certain trends in birthrate hold, the population is going to peak around 9 to 10 billion and then start declining, and in a few centuries it might be down to about 1 billion again.