Did we all collectively forget that far too many Americans were willing to spread a deadly illness, deny its existence, spread conspiracy shit about the vaccine, and host literal mask-not-allowed COVID parties, while people were dying as their lungs melted, just to oWn ThE LIbS?
Even the best military response can’t defeat the collective willful stupidity of citizens.
Yes but viruses are unseen and can’t be shot. A zombie can be seen and can be shot. I think those that didn’t understand how to fight a virus or believe it was a thing at all would happily shoot a zombie.
I wonder if I would go too far in the other direction and question whether or not shooting the zombies is necessary or if their life is precious and should have rights.
This is exactly what would happen, and they would be the exact same people that were throwing non mask covid parties. These people don’t think, they are just against stuff for the whole purpose of being against stuff.
One of my (high level studies) classmate kept complaining about the government for not having a quick vaccine for covid, and as soon as the government started to give vaccines (FOR FREE), he started saying he didn’t thrust it.
Pre-2020, all zombie movies were goofy fiction. Now, I feel like they are best-case scenarios. People are fucking dumb as shit.
If you really want to drive that feeling home watch ‘Don’t Look Up’. It’s a documentary on the incapacity for individual cognizance to overcome wilful ignorance and the very real cognitive limits of your average person.
I watched that and thought it was way too on the nose… then I heard it was written BEFORE all the pandemic and Trump shit happened. Wild!
Are you trying to infringe on my right to get my brains eaten by a zombie?? That sounds like commie talk to me. This is America, and if I want to become one of the undead, you can’t stop me!
Nah those people would be great against the infected, not so great for literally anyone around them who doesnt do exactly as he was told.
“Well he didnt look right so I pulled my gun and told him to strip so I could check him for bites, he told me to fuck off and kept walking so I had to shoot him 7 times. I couldnt take the risk he was hiding a bite.”
Those same people would be the first to pull a gun on the minimum wage clerk who asks them to present an up-to-date “I’m not a zombie” screening result.
Also yes.
If covid taught us anything, the issue with a zombie outbreak will be the hordes of rednecks and Karens failing to take precautions against getting bit, then getting bit, and then going into community safe-havens because of their freedoms, where they’ll then turn and infect others.
Covid really made me go from
“why would anyone ever hide a bite?? They’re already dead, might as well not put the rest in danger. This is unrealistic”
to
“oh yeah no of course they would hide a bite. People could pull up their sleeves to show an infected bite and they would deny it straight to their faces”
If a zombie apocalypse ever happens
I won’t be worrying about the zombies … I’ll be in more danger from other healthy people who will all be going bat shit insane and want to kill me, the neighbor and everyone else around for food and supplies because they all want to live five minutes longer than me.
In the end the survivors will probably kill more survivors than the zombies will.
In actual disasters people spontaneously self organize to help each other. That’s far and away the most common observed behavior.
Either that or they try to take advantage and loot.
I’m indigenous from northern Ontario. My parents were born and raised in the wilderness and the first ten years of my life were partly spent on or near the wilderness.
Yes people do help one another in times of need … but only if the people helping have a surplus to share. But when people are on their own without outside resources, food quickly becomes scarce.
My parents and elders told me lots of stories of famine in the wilderness in the 40s and 50s. When everyone is hungry and everyone is facing death … people start doing some ugly things to one another … murder, sabotage, lying, cheating, stealing, abandoning children and just plain letting people die. Being an orphan back then was a death sentence for children. The elderly were on their own and just expected to die when they no longer could keep up.
And that is just a thousands of years old traditional culture living in their normal environment.
I can’t imagine what would happen to people living today if they suddenly had to face death, starvation and extreme poverty. The first hundred years would be a huge adjustment for humanity and after that I expect the survivors to be more like the hunter gatherers of North America like my ancestors … or those of ancient Europe.
For a while, sure. But if normality goes away for too long you get warlords.
Reject socialism, return to feudalism.
I have 2.5 acres of swamp, solar power and plenty of ammo. I’ll just go hide. Which I do every weekend anyway. :)
Get off mah swamp
Forget cottage-core, we’re about Shrek-core now
Hello, this is your Amazon delivery driver. I’m having trouble locating your bunker address. Please send me the exact coordinates of your bunker so I can deliver this PS5 to you.
I promise not to change the locks on your bunker.
Amazon regional coordinator: … why do we keep losing delivery drivers after they go to this address?
How will you get food and water once the power (for everyone else) and plumbing go out?
Yeah, I’ve always said (and still maintain) that I’d rather die in the first wave/initial blast or whatever, rather than try to survive through the aftermath. What kind of existence is on the other side of something like that? Personally, not one I’m interested in.
I’ve heard and read the same sentiment before:
The living will envy the dead
I’m with you on that, I’ll put in some effort to stay alive and help those around me … but in the event of complete social breakdown, I’m not going to work too hard to stick around for that.
It won’t be because I gave up … it’ll be because I just won’t want to deal with all the bullshit that everyone will create just to save themselves.
It’s interesting how different people are. I wouldn’t even blink in that scenario. Go into survival mode and start surviving. It’s not as hard as you think, once you have some training. It’s actually probably quite a bit easier than working 40-60 hours per week, and trying to hold a life together in your limited free time. Sure, you won’t get Sunday champagne brunch anymore, but you won’t have to deal with a dimwit middle manager for 60% of your waking hours anymore either.
Survival is a winners game. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
Remember, if you ever want to take yourself out of a zombie apocalypse you have to shoot your brain out or you’ll just become a future problem for the living
I’ll be in more danger from other healthy people who will all be going bat shit insane and want to kill me
Well the good thing is…there won’t be too many healthy people. The vast majority of people who die in this type of scenario will be from shitting themselves to death, just as we have up until modern times.
When healthcare systems collapse it just takes one injury, one bad sip of water, a bite of questionably prepared or preserved food, and you’ll be in a world of trouble.
Exactly, I’ve spent my entire existence doing the right thing, the second it hits the fan I plan on going the Dexter route and letting loose and taking down the crazies.
I’m going to start welding Cadillacs together and become a mad max warlord.
Sounds kinda fun, I do enjoy a welding torch.
Zombies might be a threat for the first days or weeks. People aren’t used to killing, especially not things that look human, especially things that might look like a friend or family member. People would hesitate, or screw up, or think they were safe, or whatever.
But, after a short time people would either learn to fight zombies, or they’d become zombies.
Good zombie fiction isn’t really about the zombies, it’s about the breakdown of society. Bad zombie fiction has people still fighting zombies multiple years after the outbreak started.
The thing I wish you’d see sometimes in zombie fiction is no zombies. Like, a few months after the outbreak, a group of humans completely eliminates 100% of the zombies from a big island or peninsula so people within that area can live normally. It might require killing a million zombies, but that’s only 1000 zombies each by 1000 people. That’s only about 30 zombies a day for a month per person, which should be pretty easy for a dedicated, competent zombie killer. Instead, the most you get is a small walled town with countless zombies on the walls.
It just makes no sense that you typically see every survivor killing dozens of zombies per hour every day and they don’t seem to be making a dent in the local zombie population.
To be fair, we still have a covid pandemic going on because people are not smart enough to do the smart thins. They will hide their ingections, the infection screenings will be done by incpmpetent people, the rich and dumb elite will preserve zombies as “exotic pets” they show off to their friend because “they have money, so rules don’t apply to them”, and sentimental idiots won’t let go of their turned loved ones. Not to mention the otherwise entitled people who just blatantly disregard every precaution because “You can’t limit my freedom with this hoax”.
But yeah, in ideal world, the zombie outbreak would be dealt swiftly.
Yeah, but that’s because COVID isn’t 100% fatal, whereas zombie bites are 100% fatal.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that people would be more cautious of a Zombie outbreak, it just means that the dumb ones would be awarded Darwins much more swiftly, leaving only the more cautious ones behind.
The incubation time is key. Imagine, we are already carrying the virus, babies are infected in the womb or through a funghi. Some show symptoms immediately, some later, some never.
Add to that a possibility of asymptomous infection. Not only that, but assuming this would be a parasitic or viral infection, them killing the host, especially before spreading, would not be beneficial for survival, so the infection would probably become nonleathal to majority, because the surviving strands would be the ones that stay hidden the longest.
In addition, if “the efficient erradication” missed a one zombie, what guaranties are there that it was JUST one zombie? Could you trust someone who has been in contact witha a zombie, but claims not being infected? Have you been in contact with a zombie recently, mayhaps? Are you sure you haven’t been?
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True, but in the Zombie fiction I’ve come across the incubation time is extremely short. That makes it more dramatic and scary in one sense, but would make the outbreak much easier to control. In particular, if you can spread it without knowing you’re infected, the world is in real trouble.
That’s another thing that makes typical Zombies so easy to control. The only “people” who can spread it are dead. You can safely care for someone until the moment they die. As long as you can avoid getting bitten once they’re dead, you’re safe. Real diseases are so much more dangerous because doctors and nurses have to weigh the risk of getting infected against the desire to help the patient.
I’d love to see a Zombie story involving a bored nurse who follows standard safety procedures and straps a standard Hannibal Lecter style mask on any possibly terminally ill patient.
Those people just become more zombies and get killed by the competent people.
Good zombie fiction isn’t really about the zombies, it’s about the breakdown of society. Bad zombie fiction has people still fighting zombies multiple years after the outbreak started.
A good zombie series can have both. The Last of Us was really about people in the post apocalypse, not about zombies, but they were still fighting zombies 20 years later.
Which, IMO, is ridiculous. 20 years is too long for zombies to still be an issue.
Think about a typical Zombie story. The survivors are often killing multiple zombies per hour. Sometimes it’s quiet and there are none, but sometimes it’s frantic and it’s tens of zombies per hour. Say it averages out to 1 zombie per hour, but only when you’re out scavenging, so 10 per day. That’s about 300 zombies per month, about 3500 per year, and that’s without any real effort to hunt them down and eradicate them.
That’s 35,000 per person over 10 years, 70,000 per person over 20 years – and again, that’s just casually encountering and killing 10 zombies per day, without making any real effort to eradicate them. At that rate, (casually killing any zombies they happen to encounter) it would take only about 23 people to clear the entire population of Manhattan (1.6 million) over 20 years. The population of Greater Tokyo is 37 million. At 10 zombies per day it would only take slightly more than 500 people to clear every zombie from the megacity over 20 years.
Now, just imagine you had a zombie-proof wall and someone whose job it was to go stab every zombie up against the wall. They could probably do 1-2 a minute, say 100 per hour, 1000 per day. Over 20 years that one person could personally handle 7 million zombies. Clearly, you’d also need to clear out and remove the bodies, but just in terms of culling the zombie population, it would be easy to do.
Even if zombies killed 99.9% of the population, they should be uncommon after a few months, and incredibly rare after a decade.
That’s pretty much the situation in The Last of Us. Humanity has retreated behind walls. Zombies are mostly not a threat, but they exist outside of the encampments. You can live a life without fighting zombies, but if you need to travel for any reason, you’re taking a risk. The biggest risk is from the tribes of people you’ll encounter along the way though.
I like your detailed response but you do need to consider reckless people, mistakes and oversight. Encountering a horde with just 2 can become problematic.
Consistently killing 10 zombies every day for 20 years, my guess is you’d slip up sooner or later. So not killing them and trying to stay safe instead could be a better option.
They would still rot away before the 20 years are over though
Once they have a safe place, most people will kill zero a day. And the guy killing them on the walls would require them to come to the walls. Natural barriers should prevent that.
Which would mean that zombies are extremely rare after a few months, which isn’t what we keep seeing in zombie fiction.
If you.hqvent read the stand, you should. It’s excellent.
It’s not zombies but a flu, but the “breakdown” and then the “after” are as you describe.
Yup, I love The Stand. It’s not realistic in a lot of ways, but it’s a great story.
It depends on how the zombies are made - if it’s one of those “everyone who dies always comes back as a zombie” deals, the fighting will never end until the last living person is gone.
Death Stranding had something like this, except people became nukes instead of zombies when they died. Assuming it isn’t an instant switch from death to walking corpse it would probably be handled the same way with corpse disposal teams transporting bodies to an incinerator ASAP.
I’ve never seen / heard / read any zombie fiction where they were completely unkillable. The standard zombie fiction has them gone for good if you kill the brain. Sure, everybody who dies comes back as a zombie, but that just means you kill the first wave over a few years, and then make sure that any time anybody dies their brains are perforated and then they’re cremated.
There’s decent evidence for how humans would handle that situation. Ebola used to be a real problem in Sudan / Congo. Part of the problem was that typical funeral rites involved washing the dead bodies by hand. That spread the disease and more people died. Once people realized that they couldn’t do that without spreading the disease, they adapted. At a certain point the survivors would just have standard death practices that ensured that nobody who died came back as a zombie.
There are some fictional villains that are unkillable. Some that can even eventually self-assemble if you do something like cremate or atomize them. But, they’re individual villains. I’ve never heard of anything like that for hordes of zombies.
Besides, even if zombies were completely unkillable, they’re dumb. Herd them into a mine and then seal it. There are mines that are currently (or were recently) used to store Helium. If they’re so enclosed that not even the second smallest element can escape, they’re going to keep Zombies enclosed too.
I don’t believe that if everyone who died came back as a zombie (and no, zombies don’t come back - once you kill them they’re gone) that the entire world would be coordinated enough to keep them from ever becoming a threat - certain countries might be diligent enough to make sure most corpses had the head destroyed immediately, but countries with less resources would become overrun, just like disease hits them harder now. But you’re right, they could probably be kept in check by some countries indefinitely.
I think countries with fewer resources would be better off. They’re not as interconnected and dependent as the richer countries. Plus, people there are more used to hardship and probably more likely to have encountered death, even if it’s just an animal.
People in those countries are used to having to get their water from a well instead of just turning on a tap. They’re used to electricity being unreliable or going out. They’re used to not getting around by car. They don’t rely on supermarkets with their just-in-time supply chains delivering goods coming from other countries to get fed.
If there was a mild zombie outbreak, a more developed country might handle it better because they could mobilize armed forces with body armor, guns and lots of bullets. They’d have great communication infrastructure to coordinate their response, and so on.
But, if it was a devastating attack where half the population or more was dead, it would be so much worse. People in the developed world rely on modern conveniences and have never had to do without: tap water, well stocked grocery stores, reliable Internet access, reliable electricity, gas stations always having gas, etc. If the power plants started failing because too many who knew how to operate them had been zombified, that would have knock-on effects to everything else. We saw just how disruptive COVID was to supply chains, and that was a plan that a committee thought out and implemented, trying to think about all those difficulties.
World War Z (the book) had to go to extreme lengths to dumb the world’s militaries down to make it’s zombie apocalypse seem plausible… everything from completely misrepresenting the way air-fuel munitions work to completely misunderstanding what assault rifles is all about.
And the book’s silliness doesn’t stop there…
Hah, and it was basically all for nothing. If he wrote the book past covid, he would know that he doesn’t has to dumb down anything
What are assault rifles all about?
I remember the author writing an entire paragraph’s worth of screed because the stock of an M16 is not as solid as the stock of an AK - you know, for Hollywood-style zombie bashing - completely forgetting that the AK, like the M16, are rifles and that if you use them as rifles you won’t have to worry about using them as clubs. He also forgot that clubs are easy - pickaxe-handles are much cheaper than M16s.
They look scary
Actual assault rifles are fully automatic military hardware.
What most people call assault rifles are just hunting rifles in cosplay.
Most people call military styled rifles “assault rifles” whether they’re full auto or not.
Yes, that was my point.
To me, it’s not about being fully automatic or how fast they fire. It’s about how many rounds it can hold. Hunters wait for the animal to get close enough, then fire hopefully just one shot maybe two if the animal is still alive after its tracked down. No hunter is unloading 30 round clips at an animal.
You apparently have never been hog hunting. They travel in packs and don’t go down easy.
Plus, you can get extended magazines for regular hunting rifles.
But, this is a moot point because the definition of assault rifle is one that’s capable of automatic fire.
At least you got one serious answer.
They go bang-bang real fast
deez NUTS
One thing they got 100% right is the idiots. I remember being really annoyed about the chapter with people pretending to be zombies, intentionally getting bitten and spreading etc…
…and then COVID happened and proved that the real world had people at least as bad if not more.
The Japanese blind anime monk was the peak for me. The book had some good parts but man, what the hell was some of that shit
The author’s understanding of people in countries that isn’t the US seems to be based on tourism-brochure level tropes and not much else. And his depictions of South Africa and Israel betrays a lot of fascistic sympathies.
Unless it’s like Left 4 Dead virus, that thing is airborne and insanely infectious.
Yeah, the bite version just doesn’t play out, but if there’s one thing COVID has done it’s prove we’re toast if zombies can just cough on you.
Side note: absolutely love when zombie survivors are covered in zombie blood and guts, scratched all to hell, wiping black corpse gunk out of their eyes, but it’s fine because they didn’t get bitten.
about that side note, also when survivors cover themselves with zombie guts to mix themselves with zombie hordes, so zombies attack based on smell? based on looks? on behavior?
When you reach that point, zombies actually start feeling sorry for you and don’t want to bite
Zombies are like: brain where?
A zombie outbreak would end in a few days by itself. In Africa, in a few hours.
In the winter, between the cold destroying nerves and incapacitating movement and corpses getting waterlogged by rain, which would accelerate rot, zombies wouldn’t last long.
In the heat, zombies would be quickly turned into maggot meals by every fly available. Add bloating from the heat and the entire situation would sort itself out quick and dirty.
And let me just add another thought: our main advantage is our brains. Zombie crave for it but are not particularly known for using it. Any zombie trying to attack a wild animal would end up made in pieces. Bears would have a field day. Imagine the carnage by pigs and cows. A single wild boar would be capable of plowing through a horde. At some point, even dogs would turn feral and attack on sight any two legged figure.
A walking dead version? Sure. 28 days later? Nah. If those fuckers run like that, we’d be done for.
Yes I realize 28 days later technically has no zombies but it’s a more probable scenario to have a virus infect people and make them mad than actual corpses walking around.
Confession: I do not like zombie movies or series. Too much eye candy, too much gore, too much too much.
I do enjoy zombie/apocalypse like books.
28 days later was where the infected acted like rabid mobs, running around in groups?
If that was the case, a virus capable of super charging the aggression mechanism of an organism, two infected individuals would charge each other. If it’s agression based, pure, blind, agression would end itself by being too successful. Even if a groups of individuals somehow managed to maintain some sort of group mentality, any prey would be rendered to pieces. End of the line, no spreading.
Yes that’s 28 days later. But they made them only act aggressively towards noninfected. So supercharged zombies in a way but they’d die after some time without food.
I won’t assert it as fact but I think rabid animals can’t distinguish between healthy and infected individuals. If not, the infected would just tear each other apart. It’s a desease; group instinct requires higher cognitive capability.
And our bodies can last for about 3 weeks without food, assuming we are doing our best to conserve energy. Again, last 28 days and your chances of surviving go up.
How bout a zombie like virus that keeps the tissue alive but causes the conscious to fail avoiding say water but aggressively biting others, usually without killing them so the infection can run its course.
Unless it kept enough mechanisms intact to retain a good amount of self preservation, it would fail. If it avoided water actively, it would die from thirst.
Aggression is not a controlled impulse. It’s blind and does not measure outcome. How much would be enough to ensure transmission? A bite to the arm? Perhaps to the leg? Awfully specific.
The threat of infection via parasite or latent virus would be scarier than a shambler
Now that would be something to consider.
A virus capable of extreme aggression to spread in brief but spectacular sprees but, if the host died, capable of preserving itself in a dormant state would pose a major threat.
Sounds a bit like Ebola.
I’m in MN…I’m imagining what a herd of bison would do to a zombie horde lmao.
Stampede!!!
Zombies have a unique problem where their only means of reproduction are also their top predator and only food source.
Not really a food source. Never seen media where a zombie starved to redeath.
I’ve read authors where the virus is able to jump between host species.
But given the classic approach, that is a problem.
What, you expect the military to do extensive zombie outbreak war games and not be prepared for a zombie outbreak? smh
@joyjoy @The_Picard_Maneuver lol but it’s true tho
Watch out for that Boomer!
PILLS!
i remember there’s one popular piece of zombie apocalypse media that portrays it more like it would actually go down: people just briskly walk away from the zombies and the only threat actually posed is that you can’t really stop for a long time nor truly relax.
Project Zomboid player will agree lol
How about when they emerge from their bunker 20 years later to find that their fate is to be eaten by bears?
In America, it’d be a subscription service. Zombie Removal Platinum® provides a complete zombie-free experience!
I’d just get a jab of Phalanx and don’t have to worry about a thing
Yeah because only America has subscription services
Good job assuming that this is what I meant. Task failed successfully!
Huh, you mean a creature that has to rely on the same source for food and procreation isn’t optimal? Weird.
Real world zombies are very unlikely to be slow
Real world zombies are very unlikely
to be slowThere’s no such thing as “realistic zombies” lol
I didn’t say realistic, but since you want to go there…
Cordyceps and rabies would be likely candidates for potential real world zombies.
Dead ligaments move so fast…
Ah yes, they absolutely have to be undead zombies. We definitely do not have any real world examples of zombies that are infact not undead.
Zombie literally means risen dead. Parasitic control and virus driven dementia aren’t zombification.
You know what they call a zombie that isn’t dead? A sick person.
Alright man look, I’m not going to sit here and have an argument with someone who is being this pedantic.
Yes, traditionally a zombie is someone who is undead. Traditionally speaking, a zombie also doesn’t eat flesh. You can look this up in Haitian folklore.
That being said, what we refer to as a zombie is a humanoid who attacks other humans and eats flesh with little to no higher functioning, as in below any living animal. Traditionally speaking, the mind-altered state is part of what makes a zombie a zombie, not just the undead part.
That’s canabalism.
