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.
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.
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.
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.
I have 2.5 acres of swamp, solar power and plenty of ammo. I’ll just go hide. Which I do every weekend anyway. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prior to Covid I always found the internal conflicts of the humans to being unrealistic. Now, I know if this unlikely event ever happened how much worse it would be.
Mother fuckers literally would hide bites while saying zombies is a woke radical left lib rul hoax.
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.
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.
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.
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.
