http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire ** * Scientifically how could vampire's exist? Wipe out the jokes, and myths. What do you really think are there weaknesses. Besides thirst. If they were called something else whats the terms before vampire, way back. Could the bible say demons and mean other things to include the monsters we know of today. Like werewolf, vampire, and others. And is there anyone here 18 and older that will admit they might believe the possibility they really exist? And if so why?
Vampire Bats are obviously actual vampires. Their obvious weaknesses are poor sight and a small chance to get (and pass) Rabies, however they have a keen sense of hearing and capable of producing sonar tracking, they can also pickup on the infrared spectrum when looking for blood. They also "adopt" orphan bats and regurgitate food to other bats if they ask. There are other creatures such as the parasitic Leech and of course the common Mosquito Fox's Top 10 Blood suckers
Simple answer - scientifically they cannot exist becasue they are magical entities and the supernatural by definition is not science.
Two replies! OK! Maybe, let's say, vampire's don't "turn" others. They are a "race" unto themselves. Viewed as demonic or demons, or unreal. But they do and they are human like. Maybe they have reproductive issues, so there is not a lot of them. And the society of vampire's is kept in small groups. I want to think there is something human like out there and we are not just IT. That things in myth's were from truths. Maybe most things were wiped out or hunted till almost gone. But in myth they "remain" shadows of very real truths. Think for a second if vampires and werewolves were very real. The country would hunt them down and wipe them out, discredit any ideas they were here. Just like we think today. Vanhelsing, dracula "hunters", Blade... And were told there imagination. Just say.. If there really hunted before till there almost wiped out... then would you not hide out and become secretive? There may not be many other "things" left now. The older I get the more so I hear things that can't be fully explained the more I think hey maybe there is a nugget of some truth. Like why so many myths and old stories.. Why is there so many versions of a similar tale.
suppose they did even at some point in history. How could they? IMO there digestive system would be different like say a vampire bat. Vampire bats systems are ? Like ?? What exactly? If a type of human was "made like that bat" and needed blood. What would be so different?
Maybe superman is real, but the rise of the internet caused him to lose his job as a reporter and is now homeless and just doesn't give a damn anymore. Maybe leprechauns are embarrassed by the caricatures of them on the Lucky Charms cereal boxes and they have gone into hiding.
Ever seen the movie leprechauns Origin? Now I don't think superman was real. 19?- 36 he first showed up in comics. Leprechauns are storied much later. And I don't put much into those stories either. Mostly there the "keepers of gold at the end of the Rainbow". Blah! Vampire's go way, way back. As do werewolves... And yeti, and sasquatch... Maybe werewolves blur the lines. And are the sqatch.
Way way back ? How far ? Did a little research on the word 'vampire' and etomilogy dictionary .. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=vampire&searchmode=none says .. 1734, from French vampire or German Vampir (1732, in an account of Hungarian vampires), from Hungarian vampir, from Old Church Slavonic opiri (cf. Serbian vampir, Bulgarian vapir, Ukrainian uper), said by Slavic linguist Franc Miklošič to be ultimtely from Kazan Tatar ubyr "witch," but Max Vasmer, an expert in this linguistic area, finds that phonetically doubtful. An Eastern European creature popularized in English by late 19c. gothic novels, however there are scattered English accounts of night-walking, blood-gorged, plague-spreading undead corpses from as far back as 1196. Applied 1774 by French biologist Buffon to a species of South American blood-sucking bat. Interestingly, there is no Greek reference there, but the word vampire is literally two old Greek words; αίμ (am) blood πήρε (pire) taker ie, blood taker. Coincidence ? I don't know - though I wouldn't think so.
"In 1985, a scientist claimed to have found a disease that linked the myth of vampires to a very real genetic blood disorder called porphyria. People with porphyria experience the desire to drink human blood to alleviate their symptoms (the genetic disease causes abnormalities in a person's hemoglobin, a protein found in red blood cells), declared biochemist David Dolphin. His theory was later refuted and proven to be based on a misunderstanding of the disease. However, one of the real symptoms of the rare disease is a sensitivity to sunlight, with blisters forming on the skin within several minutes of sun exposure. Another real symptom is red-colored urine, according to the Mayo Clinic, and may explain why historically, people may have suspected porphyria sufferers of drinking blood."--http://www.livescience.com/6634-7-strange-ways-humans-act-vampires.html
Dependency upon the future, though doubtless minus a shapeshifting into nocturnal flying rodents and the pathological pursuing and fanged assault of victims. A partial realization of some myths via transhumanism, and relying upon the faddish nature of people for tomorrow's pop-cults to so modify themselves into post-anthropic species (that is, far beyond today's casual freak-culture of bling, tattoos and surgical embedding of protuberances / crests into the skull, etc). Granting that such a techno-philosophical movement is itself not a mythological overindulgence -- which would seem to only be possible if humankind falls into apocalyptic backwardness or the Lords of Neo-Luddism rise to globally micro-manage the influence of progress upon society. Our anthropomorphic sanguivore meme may owe its significant conceptual proliferation and entrenchment in the camps of Western art and reason to one of its "outbreaks" coinciding with the Enlightenment, and attracting its interest. Peter J. Bräunlein (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Goettingen): Between 1724 and 1760, in the frontier area of the Habsburg empire waves of a hitherto unknown epidemic disease emerged: vampirism. In remote villages of southeastern Europe, cases of unusual deaths were reported. Corpses did not decay and, according to the villagers, corporeal ghosts were haunting their relatives and depriving them of their vital force. Death occurred by no later than three to four days. The colonial administration, alarmed by the threat of an epidemic illness, dispatched military officers and physicians to examine the occurrences. Soon several reports and newspaper articles circulated and made the untimely resurrection of the dead known to the perplexed public, Europe-wide. “Vampyrus Serviensis”, the Serbian vampire, became an intensively discussed phenomenon within academe, and thereby gained factual standing. My paper depicts the geopolitical context of the vampire’s origin within the Habsburg states. Secondly, it outlines the epistemological difficulties faced by observing physicians in the field. Thirdly, it delineates the scholarly debate on the apparent oxymoron of the living dead in the era of enlightened reason. Fourthly, the early history of vampirism shows that ghosts and encounters with the undead are not superstitious relics of a pre-modern past, or the Enlightenment’s other, but intimate companions of Western modernity. [...] As it increased in authority, natural philosophy offered alternative interpretations of the world and of man. One of these was medicine, which more than any other science brandished the banner of a paradigm based on evidence, and in consequence embraced both rationalism and empiricism. In so doing, medicine promised to supply a valid answer to a question of general significance: at what point could a man be judged to be dead? Lastly, a further example will be discussed: the case of the army, which had the task of deflecting the vampire threat. Under its protection, and with bureaucratic thoroughness, expeditions were despatched to vampire-infected regions. Here, observations were collected, and minutes were taken and transmitted to the centre of power, where they were annotated and filed. Without the army, there would be no reliable vampire knowledge. Military and medical ambitions colluded and both, medicine and military, were subject to the spatial conditions and power dynamics of centre and periphery in the Habsburg empire. The vampire with whom physicians, philosophers, theologians, and the army concerned themselves so intensively in the first half of the eighteenth century first saw the light of day in the age of Enlightenment, and since that time has never been successfully put to death. Some partial victories can be reported; after the first wave of anxiety and fear generated by his paradoxical existence and life-threatening intrusions, the vampire was scientifically dissected, disembodied, reclassified as a ‘superstition’ and finally reduced to a figure of fun. Prematurely, however: for after over a century of peaceful rest in his grave, the vampire woke again, this time in the form of a hollow-cheeked, melancholy aristocrat with needle-sharp canines. Ever since that time, he has tirelessly revisited the world of the living, fed by the power of the imagination wielded by a public of readers and cinema-goers with limitless appetites. This situation presents no small difficulty for historical research. When the discussion comes around to the topic of vampires, everybody already knows what is at stake. Even Voltaire knew who the real blood-suckers were: stockmarket speculators, merchants, and tax-collectors. Karl Marx knew that capital was ‘dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour’ (Marx, 1867, p. 257). As psychoanalytically inspired literary theorists and folklorists know, a vampire is primarily a projection created by the death of a close relative (Dundes, 1998). At the very least, we can conclude from these examples that vampires are good to think with. It is not the purpose of this essay to explain why that is the case. However, the fact that the vampire has become a sociopolitical metaphor, a product of depth psychological symbolising, a figure of reflection and discussion, an aesthetic model or a pop culture symbol of an ubiquitous companion to modernity, cannot be explained without reference to the vampire’s media career. This began in 1897 with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was still producing new successes in the twentieth century, mostly in the cinema (see Butler, 2010 and Miller, 2005). The vampire offered both a powerfully expressive narrative and a repertoire of images, apparently endlessly reusable and capable of producing affect. The modern vampire myth is a stable component of common knowledge, and it encapsulates knowledge about what a vampire definitely cannot be, namely an actually existing undead person: mortuus non mordet. At the beginning of the vampire’s career, none of this was so clearcut. Rather, it was the vagueness of knowledge about its ontological status that first made the vampire into a ‘problem’ and aroused fear from several perspectives. Above all, what was threatening was the absence of knowledge among enlightened scholars themselves. The effort to overcome this would lead to remarkable intellectual struggles. --The frightening borderlands of Enlightenment: The vampire problem
