Zombie apocalypse: what really goes down?

[SiuiS]

Hey all. Something I've been wondering, is aside from typical movie stupidity, how would the world actually react in a zombie apocalypse?

You wake up to find that for the last eight hours, the dead walk and are somehow killing people and turning them into walking dead. Suicide rates are up. They are also walking dead.
How do you react? How do your neighbors react? Blow by blow. Hour by hour. Day by day. Stop when you're confident the authorities would contain it.

Move out a degree. How does your local establishment react? Are they a set of biker gangs? A neighborhood watch? The NRA? The city council? The police force? What happens? What are their foibles? Stop when you're confident the authorities would have this contained.

[Erloas]

Is there a day-zero return day or will on the day it starts will people that died before that start coming back?

Ie. If the dead started raising tomorrow would someone that died today come back then? (we could assume that someone that died long enough ago that they are decomposed past a certain point they don't come back).

If there is no transmission vector and anyone that died came back across the entire world, well it is going to add up very fast. A few quick searches puts the average deaths per day at 150,000. They would start all over the entire world at the same time so no place at all would get any advanced notice.

Which goes back to the start date, that is a lot, but if anyone that died in the last month (not too much natural decomposition in that time frame depending on the environment) that would be 4.5M people.

From there you have to know how aggressive the zombies are and how hard they are to kill and contain. Those are highly modified variables in movies and books.

Given how slowly the world responded to the Ebola outbreak in Africa I could imagine a lot of countries would go down rather quickly. The other big variable, especially in developed countries, is how much effort would be put into trying to treat victims rather than simply wiping them out.

Considering that they would be everywhere at the same time large scale bombing wouldn't really be effective. I think you would have a lot of survivors but society as a whole would break down remarkably fast.

[Chen]

The time frame between death and zombification would matter too. If it's too long people will be buried/cremated and the no real zombies will be wandering around, barring the "random person dead in their house for a long time" type scenario.

[(Un)Inspired]

Have you read Albert Camus' The Plague?

I think the country would proceed like the town does in the book except without end ( the plague disappears by the end of the novel).

People would attempt to continue their lives but would become increasingly aware of The Absurd and their inability to find meaning.

Zombies, even inevitable ones would simply be a catalyst for people wasting away emotionally.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I suspect it wouldn't nearly be a problem in countries with good communication networks and infrastructure. And less well off countries would have a harder time dealing with it, but would probably also be able to recover before too long.

There's a good reason why zombie media usually doesn't show the breakdown part of the story, or addresses it only as flashbacks or such, and that's because actually killing zombies would be like shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, that's the fun of the stories sometimes.

So I imagine it would be a problem for a few days or weeks, then things would more or less go back to normal.

After the recovery, I'd just imagine society would have different procedures for dealing with the dead and sick and probably enthusiasm for carrying weaponry would rise drastically.

[SiuiS]

Is there a day-zero return day or will on the day it starts will people that died before that start coming back?

Ie. If the dead started raising tomorrow would someone that died today come back then? (we could assume that someone that died long enough ago that they are decomposed past a certain point they don't come back).

For this scenario, indeterminate.
For my personal version, it's a rebalancing of metaphysical forces that will pick up inertia.

you know how graveyards are (in the west, at least) hallowed so the spirits can rest? But enough death eats at that sanctity and eventually overwhelms it. That's why some cemeteries are creepy and others are peaceful.

At the start (Nov. 1, all hallow's eve), areas of deep death resonance pulse, and the dead nearest them rise. These are weak and feeble, but the damage to the world's... Metaphysical state, I suppose, is done.

Anyone killed by a zombie becomes a zombie immediately, or close to. They are like the rage style ones you see in28 days later, but not so aware, more feral than rabid usually. Anyone bitten but not killed will likely sicken; they carry the same metaphysical taint as a zombie and need to survive with enough vigor to cancel out the negative energy before they Sarry healing. In a hurricane Katrina style crisis scenario, most don't. They become shambling, mindless seeming zombies as they slowly transition from sick living thing to walking dead thing.

The more zombies, the more death, the more despair and hopelessness and soul crushing anxiety and terror in one area, the deeper it gets on the metaphysical level. Sinkholes will eventually get to the point where the dust rolls together and starts forming the decayed corpses of those decades gone. Then, eventually, centuries. There's also a creepy hivemind forming, as all the zombies are vessels for one mono malevolence, but that's outside the scope of the topic of "how do Gianna handle the first few weeks".


The more traumatic and awful the death, the more immediate and more dangerous the resulting zombie would be.



If there is no transmission vector and anyone that died came back across the entire world, well it is going to add up very fast. A few quick searches puts the average deaths per day at 150,000. They would start all over the entire world at the same time so no place at all would get any advanced notice.

Aye, I assume that after a few hours, people would start to notice something, and likely respond quickly; while no government office would ever condone it, but every individual coroner would likely be "oh snap a zombie!" And handle it.

I take this to mean only vulnerable populations with some level of isolation would really be the main clusters for growth; knowing that in, say, America, there is a transient subculture that lives mostly on nonincorporated land and has more contact with themselves than with the rest of society. These folks would likely be the prime transmission drive, their creepy zombie like behavior ignored just as much as any other psycho hobo behavior. Until there was a mass of them, feral and predatory, lurking by the freeway...


Which goes back to the start date, that is a lot, but if anyone that died in the last month (not too much natural decomposition in that time frame depending on the environment) that would be 4.5M people.

Geez. :smalleek:



Given how slowly the world responded to the Ebola outbreak in Africa I could imagine a lot of countries would go down rather quickly. The other big variable, especially in developed countries, is how much effort would be put into trying to treat victims rather than simply wiping them out.

Considering that they would be everywhere at the same time large scale bombing wouldn't really be effective. I think you would have a lot of survivors but society as a whole would break down remarkably fast.

The Texas Ebola scare was actually my plot hook to explain why large swathes of land were quarantined and nobody really cared
XD.

Still, there's a difference between someone sick and dying in abed, and someone running sick and dying trough the streets, howling. If Ebola caused marathon runners, would the reaction be swifter? More immediate? More "effective"?


The time frame between death and zombification would matter too. If it's too long people will be buried/cremated and the no real zombies will be wandering around, barring the "random person dead in their house for a long time" type scenario.

Homeless people and elderly people, there's a lot of room there for suddenly thirty five to fifty cannibal corpses are attacking you.


Have you read Albert Camus' The Plague?

I think the country would proceed like the town does in the book except without end ( the plague disappears by the end of the novel).

People would attempt to continue their lives but would become increasingly aware of The Absurd and their inability to find meaning.

Zombies, even inevitable ones would simply be a catalyst for people wasting away emotionally.

Ooh, will read. Thanks!


I suspect it wouldn't nearly be a problem in countries with good communication networks and infrastructure. And less well off countries would have a harder time dealing with it, but would probably also be able to recover before too long.

There's a good reason why zombie media usually doesn't show the breakdown part of the story, or addresses it only as flashbacks or such, and that's because actually killing zombies would be like shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, that's the fun of the stories sometimes.

So I imagine it would be a problem for a few days or weeks, then things would more or less go back to normal.

After the recovery, I'd just imagine society would have different procedures for dealing with the dead and sick and probably enthusiasm for carrying weaponry would rise drastically.

How would they recover? The only way to prevent an assault is to drastically redo the entire governmental system to prevent homelessness, starvation and poverty.

Or seclude yourself in walled off towns, isolate and eliminate dangerous populations, and then reestablish society after sending hunter killer squads into the streets. How would you do that? Do you think there's a government that would do that?

[Killer Angel]

The time frame between death and zombification would matter too. If it's too long people will be buried/cremated and the no real zombies will be wandering around, barring the "random person dead in their house for a long time" type scenario.



Homeless people and elderly people, there's a lot of room there for suddenly thirty five to fifty cannibal corpses are attacking you.

Yes, but the point still stands. The quick cremation of corpses would be a priority (a common practice during epidemic), and i can even see the burning to ashes of many cemeteries, just in case.

[BeerMug Paladin]

How would they recover? The only way to prevent an assault is to drastically redo the entire governmental system to prevent homelessness, starvation and poverty.

Or seclude yourself in walled off towns, isolate and eliminate dangerous populations, and then reestablish society after sending hunter killer squads into the streets. How would you do that? Do you think there's a government that would do that?

I don't think that's the only way a recovery would transpire. For example, if there were a zombie right outside a car or a house, people would simply not go outside, and take the initiative of an immobile target to use weaponry upon them from complete safety.

I don't think things would actually progress to a complete infrastructure collapse. That's a different sort of scenario, but it still wouldn't make zombie hunting and killing impossible. It would just take longer to sort it all out. That's why places with poorer infrastructure would have a harder time of it, but ultimately still be okay.

It's a bit hard to say what the political fallout would be, but culture at large would make pragmatic changes to general practices. Probably countries clean of the affliction would send military aid to those needing help, once they've got their domestic situation handled.

Your description of the scenario (not relying on a virus) is probably one of the more dangerous versions out there, but I don't think it would be insurmountable either. Probably just more difficult until people figured out the cause behind the zombies, fought them back and worked to repair the metaphyical damage via empirical experimentation.

[SiuiS]

Yes, but the point still stands. The quick cremation of corpses would be a priority (a common practice during epidemic), and i can even see the burning to ashes of many cemeteries, just in case.

I think you might misunderstand how many people are living off the grid in clusters, though. The number of folks who come by my work late night who have been stabbed or beaten or want to do some stabbing or beating is high. If it's less than six hours, heck, less than eighteen, zombies would happen.


I don't think that's the only way a recovery would transpire. For example, if there were a zombie right outside a car or a house, people would simply not go outside, and take the initiative of an immobile target to use weaponry upon them from complete safety.

Immobile target? Singular target?


I don't think things would actually progress to a complete infrastructure collapse. That's a different sort of scenario, but it still wouldn't make zombie hunting and killing impossible. It would just take longer to sort it all out. That's why places with poorer infrastructure would have a harder time of it, but ultimately still be okay.

It's a bit hard to say what the political fallout would be, but culture at large would make pragmatic changes to general practices. Probably countries clean of the affliction would send military aid to those needing help, once they've got their domestic situation handled.

Your description of the scenario (not relying on a virus) is probably one of the more dangerous versions out there, but I don't think it would be insurmountable either. Probably just more difficult until people figured out the cause behind the zombies, fought them back and worked to repair the metaphyical damage via empirical experimentation.

That's the problem; I don't want to be told "it would be contained", I want a breakdown of how your understanding of the world would actually contain it. Protocol, standard operating procedure, types of actions taken to lock down the threat.

"Logically, this wouldn't be an issue" is maybe true, but can't stand on it's own. You're leaving it up to me to fill in the logic of why it wouldn't be an issue. That logical progression is what I'm looking for. :smallsmile:

I also severely doubt society would be able to repair a metaphysical issue as is. It upsets too many status quos to even have proof (or solid conjecture!) that a metaphysical capacity exists.

[Razade]

It depends on where you live and what time of the year it is there. Biting is a really really really poor way of spreading disease so if that's the only way the virus spreads from infected to non-infected than the "spread" isn't going to be that severe except maybe in poor areas and even then when you hear the news that rabid people are going around biting people then you clear out. The Military, in the U.S would declare Martial Law if it got to out of hand but they need not really. Dead flesh is particularly awful under most conditions, hence why it rots, and a shambling body of full of rotting meat is a playground for maggots and flies which the Zombie won't be able to dislodge. Add in that Zombies number one threat is also their number one food source and we get into even bigger problems. They'd also be ripe for the picking from wild animals if they were wandering around outside cities. Add on that the cold and the heat and the humidity of an area will turn them into beef jerky, freezer burned hunks or aid the rotting process...the Zombie Apocalypse would be less of the end of civilization and more like "remember when the dead came back to life? That was weird."

[SiuiS]

Good points.

• there is no transmission. People killed by zombies become zombies much faster, but any death leads to reanimation.

• I assume decomposition of a zombie is either nonexistent or severely slowed. This is an assumption though, I have no reason to think this other than 'totters wouldn't be a threat so let's pretend that doesn't happen'.

How does martial law work? In general, I mean. You have a city full of hundreds of thousands of people becoming violent unliving monsters at a half-life rate. You block off as much egress as possible, move in, establish outposts and evac routes. You quarantine people to make sure they aren't vectors. You shoot as many of the unclean as you can. Right? How do you avoid panic of "Becky wasn't sick, she's had a flu for months" or people settling. Arguments and grudges with guns or knives and saying "he was a zombie" or any of that?

Is that even how that would work? If not, how would it work? Walk me through the narrative. One city, boots on the ground, maybe a sergeant's POV.

[Erloas]

Well lets take Ebola again, just because it is a good indication of how some places would handle it. There were a lot of sick people that never went in for treatment, even after it was clear that it was an Ebola epidemic there were a lot of people that refused to believe that they/their loved ones had it rather than something else. Someone that dies from Ebola is highly contagious, the other problem was the cultural norms for treating the dead had a lot of people exposing themselves willingly (though often unbelieving) to it.

Even in developed countries the protocol for handling the dead changes a lot from one area to another. You would still have large parts of the population that would refuse to have their loved ones cremated.

The other problem, for every person that would happily start killing anyone that could possibly be a zombie (which in itself is going to cause more problems) you'll have another that wouldn't, no matter what. In a world without magic and such obvious supernatural things it would take the problem getting to a crisis point before many people would believe.

Another problem in the developed world is that *nothing* works if you don't have people, often unnoticed, doing their jobs. If a zombie apocalypse was officially announced how many people are going to continue going to their jobs working at that power plant, or the mines that keep them running? Who is going to go work on all of that communications structures when that is going on? Without workers (or power) you also quickly run out of safe drinking water.
They also say most metro areas are only a couple days from running out of food, without truckers and rail moving huge amounts of food every day from all over the world and country a city would quickly run out. That would cause a lot of people to go violent or reclusive pretty quickly.

If the problem were isolated to one area I could see everyone else rallying around to get things fixed and contained. With it being everywhere all at once everyone is going to start out by looking after themselves and the people close to them.

A patient 0, single source spread, I don't see it making it very far. But in this situation I think it would be hard to contain.

[Razade]

Good points.• there is no transmission. People killed by zombies become zombies much faster, but any death leads to reanimation.

So we're going with strict supernatural here? All it means is that the dead are burned and every now and then some zombies pop up. It doesn't change the fact that a Zombie (unless you've further added things like super strength and all that nonsense)


• I assume decomposition of a zombie is either nonexistent or severely slowed. This is an assumption though, I have no reason to think this other than 'totters wouldn't be a threat so let's pretend that doesn't happen'.

How do you figure that? Dead things rot. Unless what ever is animating them (and it's not a virus at his point so it's something "supernatural") somehow keeps them fresh they're still dead bodies. Flies, maggots, all sorts of bugs will go on a field day on them unless somehow the magic stops -that- from happening. And if we just keep slapping things on to the zombies so they're always a threat you're not really asking -how- a Zombie Apocalypse would go down but how your very specific Zombie Fanfic would go down.

Because even if they didn't rot humans are not very good at killing things without weapons. Humans don't have very good night vision. Or smell. Or hearing. This goes back to the fact that a Zombie's main source of food is also it's biggest threat. It would be like if every time you wanted to eat you had to kill a lion with nothing but your bare hands. You're going to lose that. Zombies would need to swarm to take down anything and swarming is NOT a good tactic for something the size and weight of a human. So again, unless you're making these Super Fast, Super Strong, Super Sensed Zombies to keep them at a threat....Zombies are not a threat in the practical world. Which gets us back to, if this is the case, than you're not asking for how a Zombie Apocalypse would go down.


How does martial law work? In general, I mean. You have a city full of hundreds of thousands of people becoming violent unliving monsters at a half-life rate. You block off as much egress as possible, move in, establish outposts and evac routes. You quarantine people to make sure they aren't vectors. You shoot as many of the unclean as you can. Right? How do you avoid panic of "Becky wasn't sick, she's had a flu for months" or people settling. Arguments and grudges with guns or knives and saying "he was a zombie" or any of that?

The rate of spread would not, would not, be that severe. It just wouldn't. Again, humans are terrible at killing so the biggest threat you'd have is just the natural dead. Or if they raised gaveyards up but...those would just be skeletons for the most part. Consider that cremation is more often used in Industrial Nations in this day and age you're not talking about a massive army here. You're talking about small pockets of raving unliving things that have no armor. Aren't bright. Don't use tactics and have 0 Preservation Instincts. They have no way to reach things in the air either. So what you actually have are cities which become shooting galleries. If this takes place in the United States (and especially The South) then the number of guns in the hands of regular people is rather high. You would have entire population centers blasting zombies away before the Military could even get there. Transportation between cities would be shut down. Blackhawk Helicopters would be sent out and the now clear streets would become avenues of Zombie Slaughter. Panic would be a problem sure, but panic in any epidemic is a problem.

With Martial Law troops would be stationed in cities and traffic would be slowed to a crawl until the "Apocalypse" was well and over. The first sight of zombies coming for the recent dead would create a mandatory Burn on Death notice through out the entire world and the lingering zombies would either get eaten by wild animals (because they're walking sacks of meat with no weapons and thus prime targets for things like wild cats and again bugs) or they'd wander into a population center and be gunned down.


Is that even how that would work? If not, how would it work? Walk me through the narrative. One city, boots on the ground, maybe a sergeant's POV.

Yes. If a massive "army" of the dead rose up in the nation's city you can bet that either militias would spring up with a heavily armed populace (again, speaking of the U.S) or the National Guard would be mobilized per state as it is intended to be in a disaster situation and the problem would be resolved. The National Guard has tanks. Tanks can just roll over zombies. They have military grade weapons. As do the cops. We have drones we can use to find hotbeds of Zombie "infestation." A real zombie Apocalypse, even with all your Goal Post moving, would be handled easily and swiftly.

But you want a full run down, again makes me think you want help writing some fanfiction, here you go.

Day 1 (Initial Outbreak): Word of the Dead Rising at Morgues are reported. In the modern day with cellphones and go pros and surveillance cameras and the world wide web the veracity of these events would travel about the world in less than 2 hours save for very very secluded or poor areas.

Day 1 (Mobilization): As further reports spread through every industrialized nation, armies are mobilized and high population centers are placed on lockdown. No traffic in and no traffic out. Checkpoints are set up within the cities and at least in the U.S a state of emergency is declared. Thus making it an arrest-able offense for non Emergency Workers and Vehicles to be on roadways. Panic would of course set in, potential fights and looting may occur but with tanks and a highly militarized police force (in the U.S) it would be easy to crack down on.

Day 1 (The Battle Begins): With the dead moving about and rising for the attack armed citizens through out the world take to the defense as one would expect. In the U.S where there are more guns than there are citizens the mobilization is swift and severe. With the streets cleared of vehicles and people, cities become shooting galleries for roaming packs of zombies.

Month One: With most Industrial Nations taking care of the initial uprising and mandatory cremation prescribed for all deaths Zombie Generation is regulated to poorer districts and areas where active and swift response would move at a crawl. Civilization would adapt, these areas taking matters into their own hands without the need of "The Man" to tell them to burn bodies. Scientists around the world would move to discover the cause of the "Zombie Virus" and methods to end it.

Post Month One: The World would move on as it always has. Zombies would merely be a fact of life, no more worrisome than Ebola in the Industrial World. It would become an "over there" problem. A method to cure or end the Zombie Plague would eventually be found (because if it's really happening it's not Super Natural and thus apply to the laws of Science) and it would cease to be an issue.

The End.

[BeerMug Paladin]

That's the problem; I don't want to be told "it would be contained", I want a breakdown of how your understanding of the world would actually contain it. Protocol, standard operating procedure, types of actions taken to lock down the threat.

"Logically, this wouldn't be an issue" is maybe true, but can't stand on it's own. You're leaving it up to me to fill in the logic of why it wouldn't be an issue. That logical progression is what I'm looking for. :smallsmile:

Well, I didn't want to get into too much detail, because I think a lot of people would face a lot of different scenarios and come up with varying solutions based on their situation and their individual resources. So describing all of the things people might do on their own would take quite a while.

Zombie outside somewhere, immobile because it's trying to get at someone inside something? Might as well shoot at it with a rifle to kill it. Repeat as long as you've still got stationary targets. If you don't have guns for that, you could still use things like nets, lassos, spears, blades or such. Some people may not off-hand have resources to do these sorts of things (or jury-rig a workable facsimile), but those that do would quickly use them, and people would highly value such resources and work to acquire them.

Got a fueled car? Weld metal bars to the door windows, reinforce the front and back bumpers a little and plant a big, tall flag of your home country on the roof the car. Drive into an infested area. Jab metal spikes through the open windows or shoot guns. Drive away when you're low on supplies and come back the next day. Repeat as necessary.

Got some area you want to keep safe? Build or set traps. Nothing fancy needed. Zombies as they're portrayed are too stupid and/or clumsy to avoid traps that would be obvious and trivial to avoid for a human.

At some point, aggregate individual behavior would just suffice to reverse the threat naturally. Like someone else alluded to before, their primary means of spread is also their greatest threat to continued existence.

If infrastructure breaks down, you'd still have engineers creating armor, traps, forging bladed weapons and so forth. All specialized to deal with the situation.

All this isn't to say that people would be headshot action heroes and effortlessly slicing through skulls left and right. Because that's silly. I'm just pointing out that it's trivially easy to be perfectly safe while also trying to actively address the situation to contribute to bringing things under control.

Military behavior would be the same as what citizens would do on their own, just being more organized and rigorous. And probably quickly acquiring specialized equipment to fight the zombies. Well, that and you'd have them obsessed about following orders and making it into a weapon! Because priorities!

I also severely doubt society would be able to repair a metaphysical issue as is. It upsets too many status quos to even have proof (or solid conjecture!) that a metaphysical capacity exists.

Zombies alone would not be dangerous enough, so you'd definitely have to have something extra going on behind the scenes. But as for weird rules of operation, if there are rules to the situation they can be discovered through ingenuity and inquisitiveness and then possibly be exploited.

Not to self-promote, but it's where I've been going in the horror thing I've been writing, but that might not be a great example, as the scenario is quite a bit different than yours.

[TheThan]

I imagine it would be dealt with as a cross between an outbreak and an invasion.
Like an outbreak, the dead are “contaminated” with unlife. Therefore it can be treated (even if that’s as simple as cremation to prevent them from rising from the grave). However like an invasion there is a force of moving bodies to deal with.
So a twofold solution needs to be figured out, deal with bodies to prevent them from rising, but also deal with those that have already risen.
For example a country would destroy areas already infested with zombies, while trying to stop further outbreaks by destroying corpses before they rise.

The basic premise of all zombie flicks is that the world is not prepared or capable of dealing with something as preposterous as a zombie outbreak. This is why it always gets out of control, and why we never see people that are ready for zombies. Imagine if the main character was a nerd that had read the zombie survival guide and turned his house into a zombie proof bunker. Sure he gets to say “ I told you so” but that’s about it, he gets to hide in his fortified, well stocked safe place surrounded with anti-zombie weapons. There’s little drama to be had.

[Brother Oni]

The question is, what would a generic country do? How would it try to contain this? What protocol is there? At what point would a real, honest to god country say "Welp, send in the hellfire missiles and pray, because if it doesn't work we're nuking everything west of (eg) Texas."?

You might find CONPLAN 8888 some interesting reading (link (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2014/images/05/16/dod.zombie.apocalypse.plan.pdf)).

As a training exercise, the instructors set up a zombie apocalypse scenario and the trainees have to devise a plan to contain and counter it; this is the result. Eight types of zombies are considered, including Evil Magic Zombies as well as Chicken Zombies (yes, Chicken Zombies), so pretty much every variant is accounted for.

[Starwulf]

snip

No way. No way every government in the world manages to react to the dead rising within a single day. I absolutely call complete and total BS on that one. We can't even react to an Ebola scare and manage to successfully contain it within MONTHS, and you expect that every government in the world is suddenly going to hear, BELIEVE(that's a big one), and react, all in one day? Not a chance in hell of that happening. At best it would take a solid month before every government in the world would be taking action, and at worst, I could easily see it taking nearly 3 months before you manage to convince the more stubborn leaders that the dead are actually rising. National armies likely wouldn't be mobilized until a month and a week(that stuff takes time to get going), but smaller armies(state militia for example) might end up mobilizing considerably earlier if the governor of that state is a little more open-minded.

You vastly over-estimate the leaders in governments. Many of them are crotchety old men who wouldn't believe in the boogeyman if it was standing in front of them, and I'd believe in zombies long before I believed in the boogeyman. And if it takes a month for the governments to respond, it's fairly well game over. With the zombies #'s increasing day by day by 150k just from those who die natural deaths, + the ones created by the chaos of having zombies running around, and only limited #'s being killed off by pockets of resistance that are quicker to react then big government, the entire world would be overwhelmed rather fast. Only communities/areas that are smart enough to wall themselves off AND figure out that it doesn't require a bite to turn will manage to survive. It could take upwards of a century for the world to eliminate all the zombies after that, and probably a solid millennia after that before humans manage to rebuild the population and buildings that were lost in the apocalypse(I easily foresee a solid 75% or more of the worlds population gone in such an event, if not higher).

As far as your ending comment goes, the OP clearly states in her 2nd post that the cause is supernatural. Therefore there is no cure. Not sure why you felt the need to add that, but it felt like some kind of unnecessary jab at SiuiS' idea for whatever reason. Supernatural is Supernatural, and thus not curable by science.

[SiuiS]

So we're going with strict supernatural here?

That's what was in the OP?


All it means is that the dead are burned and every now and then some zombies pop up. It doesn't change the fact that a Zombie (unless you've further added things like super strength and all that nonsense)

You didn't this sentence



How do you figure that?

How do you not? I'm always surprised when folks are okay with dead things not being dead but insist they still decompose. That's just a personal weirdness on my end though. Nothing to worry about.


even with all your Goal Post moving,

The passive aggression and thread crapping is unwarranted, mate. If you think the idea is stupid, you can pass by. You don't need to stop, get my attention, and clearly articulate that you think it's a stupid idea.


Well, I didn't want to get into too much detail, because I think a lot of people would face a lot of different scenarios and come up with varying solutions based on their situation and their individual resources. So describing all of the things people might do on their own would take quite a while.

Just a general idea of specifics, really. For example, there's been a lot of "no outbreak because army exists" but no mention of what the army would specifically do. I'll give razade credit for that, he dug into the specifics a bit more than most.

For weapons, the resilience of a walking corpse and the speed of fatigue setting in are drastically limiting factors. A lot of folks forget how tiring it can be to do something like chop a human body down to immobile chunks while under attack. I think an average person would only be able to really do anything to maybe three, up to five, before the mere existence of more becomes a problem.


Zombies alone would not be dangerous enough, so you'd definitely have to have something extra going on behind the scenes.

I don't think I would.

Everyone agrees on two things. One, it's infeasible for an outbreak to last long and be an apocalyptic scenario. Two, it will take about a month or two to get a grip and fix everything.

What I'm looking at, is it's going to be a hellish forty five to sixty days before this is all taken care of. How does a local power coordinate with a higher power up to the level of nations to actually clamp down? That's the story I want to see, right now. That's the detail I want to see, y'know? :smallsmile:



The basic premise of all zombie flicks is that the world is not prepared or capable of dealing with something as preposterous as a zombie outbreak. This is why it always gets out of control, and why we never see people that are ready for zombies. Imagine if the main character was a nerd that had read the zombie survival guide and turned his house into a zombie proof bunker. Sure he gets to say “ I told you so” but that’s about it, he gets to hide in his fortified, well stocked safe place surrounded with anti-zombie weapons. There’s little drama to be had.

I imagine that's not quite true. Look at any prepper, for example; when the shoot jst the fan, they fully expect people to start preying on other people. They intend to get before they get got; they shoot first. Some even plan just to take from other survivors.

Our world? Our world of Internet hoaxes, flash mob pranks, and utterly subjective morals? It would tear itself apart. Zombies aren't the problem. They're the catalyst. Humans interfere with themselves enough that a normally easy to handle situation becomes a catastrophe.


You might find CONPLAN 8888 some interesting reading (link (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2014/images/05/16/dod.zombie.apocalypse.plan.pdf)).

As a training exercise, the instructors set up a zombie apocalypse scenario and the trainees have to devise a plan to contain and counter it; this is the result. Eight types of zombies are considered, including Evil Magic Zombies as well as Chicken Zombies (yes, Chicken Zombies), so pretty much every variant is accounted for.

Score! I remember that but I didn't know they published it. :smallbiggrin:

[Razade]

That's what was in the OP?

Sorta I guess. Could have also been some strange form of virus, didn't want to assume.


You didn't this sentence

Zombie ate it.


How do you not? I'm always surprised when folks are okay with dead things not being dead but insist they still decompose. That's just a personal weirdness on my end though. Nothing to worry about.

Because there are one million types of zombies out there and each one follows different rules. You asked how it's really go down and in our world, the real world, dead flesh rots. Sure we can chuck that fact out along with the whole "Dead don't Rise" thing but if we're just going to throw every bit away that conforms to the real world then we're not actually answering what would really go down if the dead somehow started walking. Perhaps you should write a post that gives us all the characteristics of zombies that you see these following and make it easier for people to tell you how things would go. Otherwise we're just stabbing in the dark for you to shoot things down because "that's not how you see it."


The passive aggression and thread crapping is unwarranted, mate. If you think the idea is stupid, you can pass by. You don't need to stop, get my attention, and clearly articulate that you think it's a stupid idea.

I'm sorry you feel it's being passive aggressive but I'm just not sure how you want people to actually answer you if you keep throwing things out to keep the zombies "a threat" when everyone has pretty much said they wouldn't be.

[(Un)Inspired]

What thought train inspired this thread SiuiS?

Just wondering about zombies vs. RL?

[Razade]

As far as your ending comment goes, the OP clearly states in her 2nd post that the cause is supernatural. Therefore there is no cure. Not sure why you felt the need to add that, but it felt like some kind of unnecessary jab at SiuiS' idea for whatever reason. Supernatural is Supernatural, and thus not curable by science.

The main bulk...ignores the fact that we live in a world where every arm chair youtuber, every twitter user and instagram user wouldn't be reporting on the sudden rising of the dead. You can't have it both ways. Either this is a massive surge in the dead rising (again the Morgues would be the first to report this) with over one hundred and fifty thousand corpses moving about attacking people just in the U.S or it's more isolated. Because if it's the former than it's not going to take long to report on. It's just not. 150,000 anything moving around anywhere is going to attract notice and with the morgues and the graveyards expressing panic and terror globally as recently dead people start shambling around it's not going to matter how disbelieving you are. You're just going to have to look out the window and see some zombies and, at least in the U.S, start shooting them to corpsey bits.

As to the above, it's no dig at anyone. If this phenomena is taking place in the real world then it cannot by any definition be supernatural. It's natural, just not understood and unless it's some bizarre Quantum stuff or radiation or similar there is a way to find the source. Maybe the source of the sudden revivification of dead flesh can't be stopped but it can be understood. And it would be the single most important thing to understand after the Zombies were brutally put down. Because no one has actually raised any kind of reason why the Zombies would be a threat outside "They're Zombies" and making stuff up like they don't rot because Magic.

[Bulldog Psion]

There would not be enough zombies under this scenario to be a serious threat. Possibly from a personal viewpoint, but not from that of society as a whole.

People would freak out for a while, but the human mind is quite adaptable, and would soon accept the existence of zombies without too much fuss.

Sure, 15,000 zombies a day sounds like a lot, but it's spread out over a huge area. It would be rare to see more than one or possibly two in a single location.

Assuming they are susceptible to weapons, any zombie that emerged would be shot to pieces fairly fast. People don't have to worry about return fire, so they'll be braver and more aggressive than they would be with a live human opponent.

Obligatory cremation would become routine, greatly limiting the number of new zombies. There would always be a few popping up, but it would be a sporadic annoyance, not a vast danger. Living criminals would remain far more numerous and threatening.

The one spot where you'd get tons of zombies would be in war zones or in the wake of natural disasters. Those are the places where you could potentially see a "zombie horde" scenario.

[Starwulf]

The main bulk...ignores the fact that we live in a world where every arm chair youtuber, every twitter user and instagram user wouldn't be reporting on the sudden rising of the dead. You can't have it both ways. Either this is a massive surge in the dead rising (again the Morgues would be the first to report this) with over one hundred and fifty thousand corpses moving about attacking people just in the U.S or it's more isolated. Because if it's the former than it's not going to take long to report on. It's just not. 150,000 anything moving around anywhere is going to attract notice and with the morgues and the graveyards expressing panic and terror globally as recently dead people start shambling around it's not going to matter how disbelieving you are. You're just going to have to look out the window and see some zombies and, at least in the U.S, start shooting them to corpsey bits.

As to the above, it's no dig at anyone. If this phenomena is taking place in the real world then it cannot by any definition be supernatural. It's natural, just not understood and unless it's some bizarre Quantum stuff or radiation or similar there is a way to find the source. Maybe the source of the sudden revivification of dead flesh can't be stopped but it can be understood. And it would be the single most important thing to understand after the Zombies were brutally put down. Because no one has actually raised any kind of reason why the Zombies would be a threat outside "They're Zombies" and making stuff up like they don't rot because Magic.

Remember Ferguson? Boston Marathon? Other tragic events in recent memory? There was so much misinformation being spread on social media during those times that anyone who would even begin to consider it a viable source is more fool then logical thinker, and I'm sure the governments at large would certainly disregard it for a substantial period of time. They would claim that it's the work of X group/s to perpetuate a hoax of immense proportions with the addition of certain acts of violence to back up their ridiculous claims. Maybe even claim that hackers have taken over large swaths of personal social media accounts in order to bolster the false rumors. Sorry, but I don't see social media, even worldwide as being anything that's going to significantly tip the scales towards the government taking action in a quick amount of time.

And before anyone tries to go "Well, you can't listen to major media when they say there wasn't truth being spoken on social media during those times", I know there wasn't much truth going on, because during those times me and my wife were glued to twitter, and there was so much BS and falsehoods being posted up that even the few nuggets of truth were absolutely impossible to discern.




Sure, 150,000 zombies a day sounds like a lot, but it's spread out over a huge area. It would be rare to see more than one or possibly two in a single location.



Hmm, it wouldn't just be 150k though. SiuiS in her 2nd post modified the conditions to say that what kickstarts them rising from the grave would be a pulse of dark, negative supernatural energy that would affect corpses of an indeterminate time. So if it goes back as far as...a week, you have well over a million initial zombies. If you go back a month, you have nearly 5m. While 150k spread across the globe wouldn't be "that" bad, 5million could be just enough to tip the scales in the favor of the zombies. Especially considering the largest amount of corpses rising up would be in areas of greatest population(and therefore daily death). Places like New York would almost certainly fall in under 3 days. Then you just went from a mere 5mil, to 15m, just from one city. Multiply that by all the major cities in the world, and quite frankly, I don't see where the world manages to get it under control for a long freaking time. Even if Social Media was the saving grace Razade believes it would be, if a month worth of zombies rose up in the cemeteries of every major city in the world all at once, those cities would absolutely still collapse in short order. Maybe a few more survivors over-all, but that many zombies in such crowded places? Not a chance of them coming out intact.

[Razade]

Remember Ferguson? Boston Marathon? Other tragic events in recent memory? There was so much misinformation being spread on social media during those times that anyone who would even begin to consider it a viable source is more fool then logical thinker, and I'm sure the governments at large would certainly disregard it for a substantial period of time. They would claim that it's the work of X group/s to perpetuate a hoax of immense proportions with the addition of certain acts of violence to back up their ridiculous claims. Maybe even claim that hackers have taken over large swaths of personal social media accounts in order to bolster the false rumors. Sorry, but I don't see social media, even worldwide as being anything that's going to significantly tip the scales towards the government taking action in a quick amount of time.

And before anyone tries to go "Well, you can't listen to major media when they say there wasn't truth being spoken on social media during those times", I know there wasn't much truth going on, because during those times me and my wife were glued to twitter, and there was so much BS and falsehoods being posted up that even the few nuggets of truth were absolutely impossible to discern.

So to prove that social media and things like vine and youtube aren't reliable you continue to post isolated incidents. Not only that, the Boston Marathon Bombers were identified within 24 hours of the initial bombing thanks to social media and they were found and caught not by a police search but an eye witness who reported it via same said social media. And not to take away from the tragedy of The Boston Bombing it was an isolated incident. Not the world wide raising of the dead at every point of the globe. We'r simply not talking the same scale here. This is something on a scale that has not happened ever in the history of the planet. Considering that the dead rising would ping a whole slew of people's personal belief radars I simply can't see how people would brush it off as a hoax. Especially, again, when every country in the entire world would be reporting the same thing at the same time. It would be the greatest hoax ever created if you could somehow pull of a global hoax like that.

[Starwulf]

So to prove that social media and things like vine and youtube aren't reliable you continue to post isolated incidents. Not only that, the Boston Marathon Bombers were identified within 24 hours of the initial bombing thanks to social media and they were found and caught not by a police search but an eye witness who reported it via same said social media. And not to take away from the tragedy of The Boston Bombing it was an isolated incident. Not the world wide raising of the dead at every point of the globe. We'r simply not talking the same scale here. This is something on a scale that has not happened ever in the history of the planet. Considering that the dead rising would ping a whole slew of people's personal belief radars I simply can't see how people would brush it off as a hoax. Especially, again, when every country in the entire world would be reporting the same thing at the same time. It would be the greatest hoax ever created if you could somehow pull of a global hoax like that.

Hackers manage to shut down entire major companies servers and hack their databases on a seemingly monthly basis. If they can do that, it is not farfetched at all that initially the government is absolutely going to believe that the reports flowing in from social media are going to be the work of hacker groups, maybe even a hacker coalition.

And quite frankly, you have much more faith in the average person then I personally do. Sure, our society has been inundated with dozens, if not hundreds of zombie movies in the last decade, but I firmly believe that your average person, when faced with one, is going to opt for the more believable idea that the person in front of them is just terribly sick, either in body or in mind, or both, long before they believe that it is a real and honest zombie standing there. The average person is going to say "Zombie? No, those things are just in the movies, no such thing could possibly happen in real life", right up until the zombie rips their throat out with it's teeth. Hell, I'm a zombie fanatic, I've probably watched a solid 80% of every zombie movie released in the last decade(even the totally awful ones), and if I had a zombie right in front of me, I can't honestly say with any certainty that I would believe it was actually a zombie. Especially if it was someone I knew. Which seems to be something you aren't factoring in. Once other people, people that were alive at the outset, start rising up as zombies, if they are confronted by loved ones, those loved ones are going to be very hesitant in killing them because "They're a zombie".

As far as the social media bit goes, you're absolutely right, social media did actually help, but it also caused a LOT of confusion initially, with all kinds of bullcrap reports being posted up. If people had stayed off them, who is to say that the whole thing might not have been resolved considerably faster without the police/feds having to sort through tens(or hundreds) of thousands of different tweets and facebook posts. Now multiply that confusion by hundreds of millions more tweets and facebook posts as everyone across the world starts to chime in on the growing crisis. Yeaaah, governments aren't ones to react quickly on an average day when they have all the facts right in front of them, why exactly do you believe when they have to sort through hundreds of millions of social media posts, that they are suddenly going to react with lightning speed and have everything contained within a day? The whole idea, to me at least, is absolutely laughable. I'd go into more detail with how badly governments handle normal situations, but that would be getting political, so I"ll just stick to "They act slowly normally, in crisis mode they will go even slower".

[Razade]

Hackers manage to shut down entire major companies servers and hack their databases on a seemingly monthly basis. If they can do that, it is not farfetched at all that initially the government is absolutely going to believe that the reports flowing in from social media are going to be the work of hacker groups, maybe even a hacker coalition.

So now we're bringing hackers into this? It is indeed far fetched to believe that this would be part of a Hacker Group. Hacking Groups don't incite mass hoax campaigns, they steal information. We also, as a country, have a very strong and well connected anti-hacking branch. This would not at all look like a "Hacker Group".


And quite frankly, you have much more faith in the average person then I personally do. Sure, our society has been inundated with dozens, if not hundreds of zombie movies in the last decade, but I firmly believe that your average person, when faced with one, is going to opt for the more believable idea that the person in front of them is just terribly sick, either in body or in mind, or both, long before they believe that it is a real and honest zombie standing there.

You're saying that the average person isn't going to look at a rotting, shambling mass of meat covered in bugs and go "Naw, he's got the flu."? Because if that's the case not only do I most certainly have more "faith" in the average person but you have none what so ever. Corpses do not look or smell like a sick person. Nor would them starting to randomly attack people pass as "under the weather". Would they think it's a zombie, who knows. But if you think people can't discern a corpse from a living person than I frankly don't know what to tell you. Move out into the woods or something, because your world is filled with barely functioning husks and you're safer away from then than not.



The average person is going to say "Zombie? No, those things are just in the movies, no such thing could possibly happen in real life", right up until the zombie rips their throat out with it's teeth. Hell, I'm a zombie fanatic, I've probably watched a solid 80% of every zombie movie released in the last decade(even the totally awful ones), and if I had a zombie right in front of me, I can't honestly say with any certainty that I would believe it was actually a zombie. Especially if it was someone I knew. Which seems to be something you aren't factoring in. Once other people, people that were alive at the outset, start rising up as zombies, if they are confronted by loved ones, those loved ones are going to be very hesitant in killing them because "They're a zombie".

Human teeth are pretty bad at ripping, especially against a moving enemy that wants to get away. Especially if they're a zombie with no augmented strength or anything like that. Corpse is just a corpse. One zombie isn't going to be a lethal threat to a human outside of how ever they pass on this "taint" or what ever. And again, if you think most people are going to just stand around near a clearly hostile person who smells like rotting meat then...move out of where ever you are. People are going to clear the hell out of anywhere a mass of shambling, decaying things are moving about.


As far as the social media bit goes, you're absolutely right, social media did actually help, but it also caused a LOT of confusion initially, with all kinds of bullcrap reports being posted up. If people had stayed off them, who is to say that the whole thing might not have been resolved considerably faster without the police/feds having to sort through tens(or hundreds) of thousands of different tweets and facebook posts. Now multiply that confusion by hundreds of millions more tweets and facebook posts as everyone across the world starts to chime in on the growing crisis.

Of course it's not perfect but again you're simply not grasping or chosing not to grasp the scale of events here. This isn't a local tussle with someone getting shot and a bunch of people spamming crap about. This is a here to never before seen event that conflates with at least three major philosophies and is every nerd's wet dream. This is a hostile invasion from beyond the grave, not a cop shooting someone or a bombing at a sporting event. This is 9/11 times a billion. Every news camera. Every cell phone. Every video recording device would be tuned into this event. You could not, would not, be able to escape the outpouring of eye witness reports of people getting attacked by the living dead. You just wouldn't. There wouldn't be "this is a hoax!!" for very long when every, I stress every, country in the entire world would be reporting the exact same thing. World leaders would be in a scramble to get a hold of other leaders. Every national news station, every non-cable station through out the U.S would be covering this. Broadcasts of normal shows would be halted. This isn't a matter of how unreliable Twitter is. This is a matter of the inescapable fact that the entire world is effectively at war with the Undead.


Yeaaah, governments aren't ones to react quickly on an average day when they have all the facts right in front of them, why exactly do you believe when they have to sort through hundreds of millions of social media posts, that they are suddenly going to react with lightning speed and have everything contained within a day? The whole idea, to me at least, is absolutely laughable. I'd go into more detail with how badly governments handle normal situations, but that would be getting political, so I"ll just stick to "They act slowly normally, in crisis mode they will go even slower".

Except they don't. Katrina response was immediate. The Red Cross was in New Orleans during the storm with shelters set up in less than 24 hours. It certainly would be more than a day to get things into lock down on a National Scale but luckily this isn't about National Scale. This is about local scale and state scale when it comes to things like the National Guard and even smaller scale when it comes to things like The Red Cross. I'm sorry you don't see it that way and I'm happy we'll never really have to find out. But if you think there will be dragging of feet during a Global "Apocalypse" then...I guess you'd best hope you're wrong and prepare for being right.

[Starwulf]

snip

Who says they are going to be shambling masses of meat that smell awful and have bugs coming out of them? This isn't a virus caused Zombie apocalypse, this is a Supernatural zombie apocalypse, and the movies and descriptions I've seen of supernatural based zombies, they rarely smell bad, and outside of a few deformities, they usually don't even look that bad. So your average person sees someone they know, acting kinda funny, maybe/maybe not acting quite hostile, and all of a sudden they are just going to up and run? If you are that callous that you would just run away from a loved one just because they are acting kinda weird..well, I can honestly say I don't think I would in any case. Not until they showed signs of wanting to actually murder me

As far as the hackers go, dude we are talking about a massive, worldwide epidemic. Governments, before they even consider the possibility of a plague, or a virus, are going to immediately think it's just a giant hoax, and they will find whomever they possibly can to blame it on at first. Be that hackers, or cults, or what have you.

On another note, why haven't you responded to what I think may possibly be the biggest flaw in the idea that the world will be fine that I pointed out two posts ago? The simple fact of the matter is, the largest population centers also produce the largest amount of dead, and usually are also the most population crowded. Tokyo, Bejing, New York, Paris, London, etc etc, all of those places have huge populations, and are absolutely crowded as hell. Hell, China alone is responsible for some of the most crowded regions in the entire world, and they are, for the most part, some of the least advanced, and thus the most susceptible to a zombie outbreak.

So, depending upon how many zombies are actually rising up at once(SiuiS has not been definitive on this aspect, and it is absolutely the most crucial), the largest population centers in the world will be lost causes, even if the governments somehow manage to react nearly as fast as you claim(which I still don't see. Seriously, even at their fastest, it would take an entire day for them to get a full handle on the situation, reactions would come the following day), by the 2nd day, major population centers across the world would be halfway destroyed, and all of that population adding to the zombie horde. Even if the governments worldwide had the nerve to react accordingly(nukes), large swaths of the world would be uninhabitable for centuries. There would be no "Back to normal" like you claim. And if the governments decided against nuking the major population centers? The zombie hordes spread out, and even with constant missile runs by the survivors, they would still wipe out most of the rest of the world. Because 54%(Just googled it) of the world population live in major population centers, and nearly 4 billion zombies are not going to be put down by anything less then nukes.



Except they don't. Katrina response was immediate. The Red Cross was in New Orleans during the storm with shelters set up in less than 24 hours. It certainly would be more than a day to get things into lock down on a National Scale but luckily this isn't about National Scale. This is about local scale and state scale when it comes to things like the National Guard and even smaller scale when it comes to things like The Red Cross. I'm sorry you don't see it that way and I'm happy we'll never really have to find out. But if you think there will be dragging of feet during a Global "Apocalypse" then...I guess you'd best hope you're wrong and prepare for being right.

Since you added this after I quoted your post, I just now saw it. Yeah, the government really did a bang up job with New Orleans. People getting murdered, and women getting raped in the rescue camps that the government set-up. Untold billions of dollars going all over the place and no-one really knowing where it was going. There's a reason that the FEMA director ended up stepping down after that particular disaster. Because the government did an absolutely horrendous job in handling that situation.

But yes, in the end, I agree that it's probably best we just stop debating each others posts, because you have way more faith in the world governments then I personally do, and apparently way more faith in the average person's intelligence then I do, so we are obviously not going to see eye to eye on this issue. I don't see the world coming out of this even remotely intact, while you believe the world will be absolutely fine within a month and all things will be back to normal except new regulations involving the disposing of dead people.

[TheThan]

I imagine that's not quite true. Look at any prepper, for example; when the shoot jst the fan, they fully expect people to start preying on other people. They intend to get before they get got; they shoot first. Some even plan just to take from other survivors.


Well yeah, but that actually depends a lot on the specific scenario.

Are we doing a human vs human situation with the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop?

Or are we doing Human vs zombie?

If we’re going a human vs human, than your claims really do hold up and honestly is a much more interesting scenario. That human element is essential to the story and our mythical zombie prepper has to deal with scavengers and other survivors.

On a human vs zombie scenario, our mythical zombie prepper just bunkers down for the duration and only comes out when his supplies run low or he gets an all clear on emergency signals. That’s kinda boring. Unless you do a story about someone setting himself up during or after the outbreak; while interesting, it’s eventually going to settle down into routine.

lastly we could do a small group of survivors setting up shop. but that falls back on the human vs human element and can actually turn into a soap opera with zombies.

[Bulldog Psion]

About the people just standing there and letting zombies chew on them because they don't believe in them.

IMO -- no. Just no.

For one thing, probably a good 30% to 40% of people have a background belief that stuff like zombies, vampires, werewolves etc. are real. Sure, they likely deny it even to themselves, but then they believe stuff like malevolent houses where people are possessed by pigs from Avernus and stuff really happen. In developing countries, the belief in evil spirits and walking corpses would be even easier to find.

I mean, you get some Mexican cop from a small to mid size town away from the capital, and he's not going to think twice before deciding this must be the work of a brujo and responds accordingly.

Secondly, everybody with access to a television, a movie theater, or a computer has seen at least one zombie flick, I daresay. And there are zombie books, zombie hoaxes, zombie discussion, zombie comics, on and on and on. The concept is extremely familiar, and it comes in so many flavors that there's a scenario that would fit with just about anyone.

I mean, you get someone heavy into supernatural stuff and conspiracy theories, and they see a zombie, and they're going to start thinking "the dead are rising, man! Time to break out the 12 gauge and the machete!"

Then you get someone like myself, who is a deep-dyed rationalist. I see people staggering around, apparently falling to bits, attacking other people and chewing on them, and I think, "Either I'm hallucinating, or there is some zombie-style disease driving these people insane to try to spread itself. Time to break out my 30.06 and then call the police to see what's going on. And check the Internet. And in the meantime, fire on anything shambling that comes near my house and won't turn back when I order it to."

And that brings me to my final point. The immemorial mammal underneath the civilized surface doesn't give a fig for zombies, incredulity, or whatever. The human animal is going to see a dangerous enemy lurching towards it, offering to claw, bite, and devour, and all those fight-or-flight instincts are going to kick into high gear and say, "I don't care what you believe, madam or sir, this flesh wants to live, so in your terror and the aggression response it triggers, you are going to seek your weapons and stop that thing before it chews on me!"

People shoot other living, healthy people every day as perceived threats. Do you really think they're going to hold their fire when some stinking, decaying, snarling, lurching horror comes prowling towards them, teeth snapping and fingers reaching for their throat?

They're not going to be like, "Oh, I say, old chap, zombies aren't real, you know, so you must be a hallucination. Cheerio! I'll just ignore you while you chew my face off, what?"

They're going to be more like, "Stop right there, you blank-blanked blanker-blanker! No? Well" BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM "I told you to stay back, you blank-blankin' blanker!"

And as for governments taking forever to respond -- how long do you think it would take for them to respond to an actual invasion? If local law enforcement and federal employees in San Francisco, say, started calling Washington saying that landing craft were coming up on the beaches and disgorging foreign soldiers, and the TV stations and Internet lit up with hundreds of cell phone videos showing armed men streaming ashore, do you really think the U.S. government and Army would sit there for a month trying to figure out if it was real? They'd be moving rapid response assets and carrying out aerial recon within a couple hours at most, probably less. Full mobilization wouldn't be far behind.

The zombie thing might take a bit longer for a strong response, but if it was widespread and real, I can't see it as taking more than a day or two. The local police forces are going to respond to a rash of attacks and general mayhem. The cops are going to find shambling corpses wandering around attacking people. Being of the "shoot first and ask questions later" type when it comes to personal danger, they're going to put down any zombie that comes for them and won't stop after a warning.

Then they will call this weirdness in to the local police station. The local police commanders are going to note this as highly unusual and have an 80% chance of phoning it in to federal law enforcement, 100% once there are actual gangs of zombies, repeated attacks, or the phenomenon continues over several hours.

So, if it's all over the place, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, etc. are going to start getting thousands, then tens of thousands of calls from local police departments. They in turn are going to call their field agents (who will likely be reporting in also) and find out that there is something large-scale, bizarre, and extremely threatening going on.

So, they are going to get on the phone to the President and the Pentagon and say, "there is some bizarre countrywide invasion going on. We don't know what it is yet, but it's very real, we've gotten 20,347 calls from local law enforcement and 11,902 calls from our field agents in the past three hours, and they all report the same thing."

And the President and Pentagon are going to say "we're under attack! Call out the Army!"

It doesn't matter if people believe in zombies or not. If I'm sitting and playing video games late at night and some person comes crashing through the window, stinking of corpse, snarling and gargling and trying to reach me, I'm going to high-step to my gun case and pump him full of lead if he doesn't stop the first time I tell him to. Because I want to live.

The disgusting, horrible appearance of the attackers isn't going to cause incredulity. It's going to trigger those self-defense instincts even faster and with extreme prejudice.

ANY national government will have the same response, on a rather grander scale, if enough windows are crashed through in brief span of time. Except they won't bother with the "stop or I'll shoot" warning once they get to the high-stepping and lead-pumping phase of the scenario.

Bottom line: I think Razade's right. This massive scenario would trigger an equally massive and swift response. If this was 1540, things would be a lot slower and patchier. But the world is one big communications device today. Our organizational and response skills have been honed by crises and kitted out with all kinds of doo-dads that make responding in a coordinated fashion a huge, but doable task. The response to a zombie invasion would be swift and terrible.

[Razade]

Well yeah, but that actually depends a lot on the specific scenario.

Are we doing a human vs human situation with the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop?

Or are we doing Human vs zombie?

If we’re going a human vs human, than your claims really do hold up and honestly is a much more interesting scenario. That human element is essential to the story and our mythical zombie prepper has to deal with scavengers and other survivors.

On a human vs zombie scenario, our mythical zombie prepper just bunkers down for the duration and only comes out when his supplies run low or he gets an all clear on emergency signals. That’s kinda boring. Unless you do a story about someone setting himself up during or after the outbreak; while interesting, it’s eventually going to settle down into routine.

lastly we could do a small group of survivors setting up shop. but that falls back on the human vs human element and can actually turn into a soap opera with zombies.

The Human v Human stuff would be just as boring and easy to deal with. The Zombies aren't going to go after vital services like water or really impact our ability to maintain them. And one of the biggest flaws of any Apcolypse movie is that they vastly lean on cynicism. If human beings were as rotten and self serving as the movies and books want to show we wouldn't HAVE zombie movies. Humans band together, it's what we do. We're a species conditioned to need other human interaction. Bad bad stuff happens to people who remove themselves from any form of human contact over a long period of time. We built towns to bring ourselves closer together. Sure there'd be looting and bands of people running around being bandits but that stuff wouldn't last long. We wouldn't descend into animals when our toys shut down. History and the preponderance of evidence simply does not support such a result.



Bottom line: I think Razade's right. This massive scenario would trigger an equally massive and swift response. If this was 1540, things would be a lot slower and patchier. But the world is one big communications device today. Our organizational and response skills have been honed by crises and kitted out with all kinds of doo-dads that make responding in a coordinated fashion a huge, but doable task. The response to a zombie invasion would be swift and terrible.

Especially in places like the U.S where military grade equipment is in the hands of local law enforcement. When a small town in New Mexico has drones for their Police Force and tanks for riot occasions even the response from local law enforcement is going to be swift. They are trained to deal with scenarios like this after all. There are so many layers the Zombies would have to filter through that even if it took a week for the actual U.S Military to come around the local gun totting good ol' boys, the police and the national guard would already have things pretty much well taken care of.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Thanks to some of the conversation here, I'm envisioning a remake of Independence Day that has some drastically different scenes in it.

"Mr. President, we appear to have a number of massive unidentified exotic craft hovering over many important places all throughout the world. What should we do?"

"Bah! Ignore it. It's obviously just kooks making up silly hoaxes and sensational media exaggerating the claims. Stupid people will believe anything these days."

"Mr. President, could you come over here and look out the window? Specifically in the up direction? I propose doing so would give you critical information that it would be pertinent for you to consider."

"I don't have time to waste by indulging in your silly nonsense! Now about those latest polls, how am I doing?"

"...as it turns out, quite badly, sir."
As for a zombie thing, if I saw a stranger acting crazy and either attacking people or coming right at me, I don't think I'd stick around for a hug.

I agree police organizations would be flooded with calls, investigate and quickly spread reports of the activity to their higher ups, who would likewise do the same with their higher ups. With video and such. It wouldn't take long to get the thing confirmed and at least begin planning a response at the highest levels.

[Chen]

On another note, why haven't you responded to what I think may possibly be the biggest flaw in the idea that the world will be fine that I pointed out two posts ago? The simple fact of the matter is, the largest population centers also produce the largest amount of dead, and usually are also the most population crowded. Tokyo, Bejing, New York, Paris, London, etc etc, all of those places have huge populations, and are absolutely crowded as hell. Hell, China alone is responsible for some of the most crowded regions in the entire world, and they are, for the most part, some of the least advanced, and thus the most susceptible to a zombie outbreak.


Here's the death statistics for NYC in 2012:

https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2012/table32b.htm

Assuming an even distribution that's around 264 dead per day. That drops to 67 per day at home or in public places. And over 70% of these are over 65 years old, so probably not the best in shape/strongest zombies to begin with. Population density in NYC is around 24000 per square mile representing about 0.3% of the population per square mile. If we assume that 67 per day is randomly distributed you'd have 1 dead per roughly 5 square miles per day, in public. The zombie from random dead people out on the street/in houses are probably not at any risk of forming a horde.

Hospitals, nursing homes and the like are certainly more concentrated. That said it's still probably only a couple of deaths per day (max) at each hospital/nursing home. And again, the vast majority of the people dying here are elderly and thus probably far weaker than those attending them. They'd be fairly easily subdued after they rise. And that's assuming an instant rising. If there is a time delay (which was specified) odds are they'd be in a morgue and locked in a freezer type thing. I don't even know if they'd be able to get out.

[Erloas]

And that brings me to my final point. The immemorial mammal underneath the civilized surface doesn't give a fig for zombies, incredulity, or whatever. The human animal is going to see a dangerous enemy lurching towards it, offering to claw, bite, and devour, and all those fight-or-flight instincts are going to kick into high gear and say, "I don't care what you believe, madam or sir, this flesh wants to live, so in your terror and the aggression response it triggers, you are going to seek your weapons and stop that thing before it chews on me!"

I think this is your main problem. You're counting this as a positive, this is actually what takes down society, not the zombies. Zombies are usually just the catalyst, they are what gives people the opportunity to step outside of society's normal acceptance and act like the animals we are.

And yes, I imagine local police will start responding quickly. But at the start just something "routine" like a car crash, people will run to check on the person to see if they are hurt, they get close to help them and they turn into a zombie. Someone in a car crash is going to be bloody and torn up, some will be alive and some will be undead, and before "zombie apocalypse" is officially announced no one is going to even question the fact that they aren't just hurt.

There was a case about a year ago where someone attacked and started biting someone else, and yes, he was killed by the cops. But while it did make a blip on the social media scene it wasn't that much and no one believed it was a real zombie even though he clearly acted like we expect a zombie to.

You can also look at the violence and crime in many cities (around the world) and see that a lot of it goes on without anyone able to stop it. Some gets notice and a lot of it doesn't.

But in the end, it is people going into that "animal" mode that brings everything down in the first place. You can't bring relief supplies into the "trouble areas" when everywhere is a trouble area.

Lets take Ebola again, it has killed ~9000 people since it start. It started in March 2014. 9000 dead, 22000 cases, over the course of 10 months and it ground the economies and daily life of 3 countries to a practical halt. We're seeing 166x that number in a single day (at least, that is just average deaths, not even counties previously dead rising). It has taken them that long and they are still having people refusing to seek treatment, they are still mishandling their dead, it has overwhelmed their health care systems and they simply don't have the numbers of people to go around and check the country and try to enforce the rules they are trying to put into place.


All you have to do is start people to panic and the panic does the rest. People rush to the store to get food, stores go empty in hours. Just look at the big winter storms in NE USA, a lot of stores ran out of food in very short order. Given it was a storm, it cleared up and they brought more back in. But if the dead started rising, and people truly believed it, they are going to start hording, they (because they are genre savvy because they believed it after less than a day) are going to start fighting for food and resources. People will get killed in those situations (we see people dieing from black friday deals for TVs). We see plenty of looting after any sort of civil disturbance (see storms, and various other social unrest situations lately [not going more specific for board rule reasons]).


Who continues to go to work in those situations? That truck driver on the road with a truck full of food, if he believes it, knows he has a very valuable commodity and could live off it a long time or sell it on the black market for a lot.

People don't go into work, they gather resources, stay to protect their family and what they have. We already see this happening in natural disasters and it takes an area down pretty quickly. In all of those cases though we have unaffected people somewhere else to come in and help, to bring them what is missing and to make sure stuff gets through. But when there is no place at all that isn't affected there is no one to respond to those areas.


That is of course why so many zombie stories go the human route, because zombies in and of themselves aren't really a threat. But they cause people to ignore the "rules" of society and it doesn't take long for things to break down. It is all to clear what violence and self-centeredness people can go to very quickly.

[comicshorse]

Just to say this might give you some ideas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Flesh_%28TV_series%29

and if it doesn't its still well worth watching

[Razade]

Who says they are going to be shambling masses of meat that smell awful and have bugs coming out of them? This isn't a virus caused Zombie apocalypse, this is a Supernatural zombie apocalypse, and the movies and descriptions I've seen of supernatural based zombies, they rarely smell bad, and outside of a few deformities, they usually don't even look that bad. So your average person sees someone they know, acting kinda funny, maybe/maybe not acting quite hostile, and all of a sudden they are just going to up and run? If you are that callous that you would just run away from a loved one just because they are acting kinda weird..well, I can honestly say I don't think I would in any case. Not until they showed signs of wanting to actually murder me

Because dead things smell? It doesn't matter if it's a virus or not. Unless this magic somehow stops putrification altogether (and what a powerful magic that would be). Also, again, this wouldn't be Supernatural. There is NO such thing as Supernatural. If it exists and happens in our world it's natural. Because it's something that happens in our Universe. Others have already responded to the notion that a regular person would see a corpse walking around and just see them as being sick as have I. Unless this "magic" somehow makes them look like a living person there's no mistaking a corpse from even a mortally ill human.


As far as the hackers go, dude we are talking about a massive, worldwide epidemic. Governments, before they even consider the possibility of a plague, or a virus, are going to immediately think it's just a giant hoax, and they will find whomever they possibly can to blame it on at first. Be that hackers, or cults, or what have you.

I have no clue where you get this certainty that governments will immediately assume that a global rising of the dead would be a hoax or "hackers" but I don't think you have any sort of evidence to back that up in the slightest. World Governments are not particularly known for scoffing at security threats. Also, I'm not sure you know what Hackers are.


On another note, why haven't you responded to what I think may possibly be the biggest flaw in the idea that the world will be fine that I pointed out two posts ago? The simple fact of the matter is, the largest population centers also produce the largest amount of dead, and usually are also the most population crowded. Tokyo, Bejing, New York, Paris, London, etc etc, all of those places have huge populations, and are absolutely crowded as hell. Hell, China alone is responsible for some of the most crowded regions in the entire world, and they are, for the most part, some of the least advanced, and thus the most susceptible to a zombie outbreak.

So, depending upon how many zombies are actually rising up at once(SiuiS has not been definitive on this aspect, and it is absolutely the most crucial), the largest population centers in the world will be lost causes, even if the governments somehow manage to react nearly as fast as you claim(which I still don't see. Seriously, even at their fastest, it would take an entire day for them to get a full handle on the situation, reactions would come the following day), by the 2nd day, major population centers across the world would be halfway destroyed, and all of that population adding to the zombie horde. Even if the governments worldwide had the nerve to react accordingly(nukes), large swaths of the world would be uninhabitable for centuries. There would be no "Back to normal" like you claim. And if the governments decided against nuking the major population centers? The zombie hordes spread out, and even with constant missile runs by the survivors, they would still wipe out most of the rest of the world. Because 54%(Just googled it) of the world population live in major population centers, and nearly 4 billion zombies are not going to be put down by anything less then nukes.

Someone else gave a pretty good post, but I didn't respond to it because it's no where near as big a problem as you'd like to think it is. 4 billion people don't die in a single day and the Zombies would just not be that good at killing things as I and several others have pointed out. Humans are not very good at killing things without tools, we're just not. We're not fast, we're not good at smelling things. We're not good at hearing things. We're not good at much of anything when it comes to physical activity when compared to the other Apex Predators. Unless you want to slap on "The Zombies are super fast. The Zombies are super strong." a dead guy isn't going to be much of a threat. As I've also pointed out, a zombie's main method of feeding is killing it's Apex Predator every. Single. Time. That is the worst kind of survival tactic every imaginable. Evolution would put a stop to the "Zombie" rather swiftly were they naturally occurring. They're simply not equipped to deal with the lot they've drawn in Unlife. Unless we start suping up our little Zombie problem with further Magic then zombies are just not a problem and then all it becomes is a verbal arms race of "My laser kills everything. Nu-uh I'm immune to lasers" and if that's how the thread is going to be I'm out.


Since you added this after I quoted your post, I just now saw it. Yeah, the government really did a bang up job with New Orleans. People getting murdered, and women getting raped in the rescue camps that the government set-up. Untold billions of dollars going all over the place and no-one really knowing where it was going. There's a reason that the FEMA director ended up stepping down after that particular disaster. Because the government did an absolutely horrendous job in handling that situation.

I'm not exactly sure what your point is here. Because there was crime in the camps they set up and because a one off mess up in a disaster situation....that's clear that they're just crap at their job or something? You'd do well to take some courses in statistics. I fully agree the issue with Katrina was a right mess on a logistical stand point but no system is perfect. It wouldn't just be up to the government though, as I've pointed out, that things like the Red Cross and even local armed gangs would be the ones to respond first.


But yes, in the end, I agree that it's probably best we just stop debating each others posts, because you have way more faith in the world governments then I personally do, and apparently way more faith in the average person's intelligence then I do, so we are obviously not going to see eye to eye on this issue. I don't see the world coming out of this even remotely intact, while you believe the world will be absolutely fine within a month and all things will be back to normal except new regulations involving the disposing of dead people.

What I'd really prefer is for you to stop telling me what I have faith in. As I've pointed out before, if a "crisis" like this was enough to send us spiraling into oblivion then we wouldn't have the internet to debate it today. We've gone through much worse on a much grander scale over the course of human history and we've been just fine. We've been nearly wiped out at least twice, as a species, and we've rebounded. With a lot less technology and with a lot less numbers than we'd have. I'm glad however that I don't live in the world as you see it because it's a bleak place indeed.

[comicshorse]

Thanks to some of the conversation here, I'm envisioning a remake of Independence Day that has some drastically different scenes in it.

"Mr. President, we appear to have a number of massive unidentified exotic craft hovering over many important places all throughout the world. What should we do?"

"Bah! Ignore it. It's obviously just kooks making up silly hoaxes and sensational media exaggerating the claims. Stupid people will believe anything these days."

"Mr. President, could you come over here and look out the window? Specifically in the up direction? I propose doing so would give you critical information that it would be pertinent for you to consider."

"I don't have time to waste by indulging in your silly nonsense! Now about those latest polls, how am I doing?"

"...as it turns out, quite badly, sir."
As for a zombie thing, if I saw a stranger acting crazy and either attacking people or coming right at me, I don't think I'd stick around for a hug.

I agree police organizations would be flooded with calls, investigate and quickly spread reports of the activity to their higher ups, who would likewise do the same with their higher ups. With video and such. It wouldn't take long to get the thing confirmed and at least begin planning a response at the highest levels.

Indeed, if zombies are rising everywhere then they are rising EVERYWHERE. If the decision makers can look out the window and see them then things are going to start happening pretty damn fast
I have no idea how fast the military can mobilize in an emergency but I can't see it being months in any situation so the question is what happens in the time before they get mobilized. If the country has sufficient armed police then they could handle the situation (given, as has been pointed out , what terrible combatants zombies are) IF they are given the go ahead to shoot-to-kill and IF gung ho civilians don't go out shooting anything that moves on a zombie hunt. I'd see it being handled in a few days but they could be a nasty few days

[Starwulf]

snip

This will be my last post responding to you, because as I said, nothing you are saying is going to convince me otherwise, and obviously nothing I say will convince you otherwise. There are just a few points I want to address quickly. Have you never heard of suspension of disbelief? In SiuiS OP, it is obvious that this is an alternate world we live in, where the supernatural, can occur. I mean hell, these whole forums are dedicated to a game that is absolutely abound with supernatural occurences. Ghosts and demons, magic being cast from absolutely nothing. Absolutely insisting that supernatural cannot exist is absurd given the OP's parameters. SiuiS has mentioned that the zombies were reanimated by dark energy/magic. That to me signifies that the zombies aren't likely going to be rotting at all. Because it's, ya know, Supernatural. Oh, and the killing bit? If you had even bothered to read SiuS entire post, you'd have seen she clearly stated that the zombies would be like the ones from 28 Days later infected by the Rage Virus. Super Fast, with slightly less aggression. Those zombies were quite capable of ripping people to shreds with their hands and teeth.

And my faith in the government is nil, because I was in the army and I can tell you with absolute certainty that nothing happens at any speed, no matter how important it is. I have two relatives who work in D.C. in government jobs and all I ever hear about from them is how bureaucratic red-tape stifles everything to a crawl. So yeah, that's my reasons for believing the government would not be capable of responding in amount of speed in a major crisis like a zombie apocalypse. And city and state governments are just mini-versions of the federal government, there is zero reason to believe that they are going to react any faster.

Anyways, enjoy the thread, I'm absolutely done, as you and another have been particularly rude in several of your responses in this thread, and I don't deal with rudeness for any reason in my life. BeermugPaladin, it is not ok to mock someone, even jokingly. There is a MASSIVE difference between giant spaceships the size of small cities floating overhead, and zombies that could very well look like normal people. So taking my stance that the government would want to believe it is a hoax and use it to mock me with the independence day scenario you wrote is rude and offensive ><

[Razade]

This will be my last post responding to you, because as I said, nothing you are saying is going to convince me otherwise, and obviously nothing I say will convince you otherwise.

Except that's not true, at least for me. Your points have merely failed to do so. But if you're unable to be convinced, by your own words, then what is the point of a discussion? If all you want to do is make your points and then end the discussion then...that's your prerogative. But that's not a method of rational discourse. At least you're honest.


There are just a few points I want to address quickly.

Of course.


Have you never heard of suspension of disbelief? In SiuiS OP, it is obvious that this is an alternate world we live in, where the supernatural, can occur. I mean hell, these whole forums are dedicated to a game that is absolutely abound with supernatural occurences. Ghosts and demons, magic being cast from absolutely nothing.

Nope, never heard of it. But of course I have. The OP and subsequent stuff is merely to unbelievable to ignore. Here's the kicker though. Ghosts and demons and magic in games is supernatural because it's beyond what our world can do. If any of that stuff were real it wouldn't be supernatural. That's just how things go. If magic were real, it would be part of our natural world. Hence, not supernatural.


Absolutely insisting that supernatural cannot exist is absurd given the OP's parameters. SiuiS has mentioned that the zombies were reanimated by dark energy/magic. That to me signifies that the zombies aren't likely going to be rotting at all. Because it's, ya know, Supernatural. Oh, and the killing bit? If you had even bothered to read SiuS entire post, you'd have seen she clearly stated that the zombies would be like the ones from 28 Days later infected by the Rage Virus. Super Fast, with slightly less aggression. Those zombies were quite capable of ripping people to shreds with their hands and teeth.

Right, so they get super strength and super speed. Because it's the only way to make them believable. Also, the Rage Virus didn't make the "zombies" in 28 Days Later "Super Fast". They were as fast as regular people they just never got tired.


And my faith in the government is nil, because I was in the army and I can tell you with absolute certainty that nothing happens at any speed, no matter how important it is. I have two relatives who work in D.C. in government jobs and all I ever hear about from them is how bureaucratic red-tape stifles everything to a crawl. So yeah, that's my reasons for believing the government would not be capable of responding in amount of speed in a major crisis like a zombie apocalypse. And city and state governments are just mini-versions of the federal government, there is zero reason to believe that they are going to react any faster.

And I am an average Citizen and have gone through enough bureaucracy to know that the Government does get stuff done. Personal Experience is not sufficient evidence except for you and yourself alone.



BeermugPaladin, it is not ok to mock someone, even jokingly. There is a MASSIVE difference between giant spaceships the size of small cities floating overhead, and zombies that could very well look like normal people. So taking my stance that the government would want to believe it is a hoax and use it to mock me with the independence day scenario you wrote is rude and offensive ><

I'm offended by your offence!! :smallfurious:

[Bulldog Psion]

Okay, just three points here.

1. Even if the zombies somehow look like ordinary people, smell like them, etc., they sure the heck won't be acting like them. Unless we assume they retain their normal intelligence, in which case they won't be a problem because we don't ordinarily run around trying to eat each other.

I mean, if I see some lurching fellow trying to gnaw the postmaster's upper arm off, I'm going to get a vague idea PDQ that something isn't according to Hoyle. If the homeless lady in the alley starts advancing towards me, licking her lips, snapping her teeth hungrily, and never blinking as she claws for me, I'm not going to think, "hey, she must just want a five-spot for a burger and fries!"

Sure, average people aren't going to be designing rocket engines any time soon, but it's kind of offensive to say that average intelligence is that stupid -- that people are incapable of detecting highly anomalous and threatening behavior and dealing with it, in this case, via retreat, combat, or containment as the particular instance seemed to warrant.

Regardless of anything else, the zombies are going to get utterly dirty, ragged, and unkempt fast. I wouldn't doubt that quite a few harmless homeless people would be shot, too, but that's not going to cause societal breakdown.

2. About societal breakdown -- it's not going to happen. Societies were created because people need and want them. They are not something that dropped onto us from the outside like a hamster wheel in a hamster cage. They are our inventions as much as the wheel, gunpowder, vaccination, eyeglasses, telescopes, transverse flutes, or flint hand-axes.

Societies exist because we want them to exist. Even the most primitive and warlike tribes have some kind of social arrangements. The Hobbesian universe is a myth. Society would not break down easily because the vast majority of people have a powerful incentive to keep it alive. In fact, if it dies, most of us die, too, without the need for zombies.

It would take a lot to break society down. For a start, everybody knows about it; even if there was a temporary collapse, everyone would work to restore the society they were most familiar with. Even if there was a major infrastructure disruption, knowledge of the Constitution, say, in the U.S., wouldn't vanish. It's printed in a billion places. Many people would work to restore the nation that had existed; they would likely succeed.

Even if a total collapse occurred, technology was lost, all information was somehow lost almost instantly, and most of the population died, people would still organize to survive. The clever and skilled would be used to direct creation of necessary things (water for crops, crop fields, hunting parties, patrols, etc.).

They would thus naturally fall into the role of leaders. Leaders would start clans, clans would become city-states, city-states would become nations, and there everything would be again, right where it is now. It would take a while, but it would happen.

3. This "zombie rising" scenario is a very mild one. A few thousand zombies a day in the U.S., say, is nowhere near enough to bring it down. Tens of millions of people fought over Europe in World War II, bombing and shelling it flat, basically. And you know what? After it ended, people rebuilt and went on with their lives, and it's still going forward.

This zombie thing isn't even as disruptive as a border war. There would probably still be more drug-related gang shootings than zombie attacks, and only a small fraction of those attacks are successful, simply because humanity has externalized its physical adaptations in the form of tools, to increase its versatility. Once tool-use is gone, a human is about as effective as a driveshaft without a car around it.

Humanity made the phoenix, I believe, to symbolize itself. This zombie scenario is a nuisance -- a lethal one to a few people who draw the short straw, but a nuisance nonetheless. Mankind would be damaged a little, observe, adapt, respond, and go on.

[SiuiS]

Razade, the problem you're having is twofold. One is the nature of the question; it's a Socratic discussion, for one. This means given the base assumptions are true, what is the fallout. If you look at the base assumptions of an apocalyptic scenario and think, "that's not apocalyptic", then instead of pointing that out we adjust so it is, indeed, apocalyptic. Not that it takes much adjustment mind. A temporary apocalypse is sufficient, because that sliver of time is the point.

The second issue is abstraction level. You're answering a mathematics question by saying "we'll come up with an equation and get the number, easy peezy", which is true but irrelevant. I don't want to know if it will be solved, I want to know what processes go into solving it, which variables are isolated, and how much bickering the folks solving it go through before they actually start working together.


No way. No way every government in the world manages to react to the dead rising within a single day. I absolutely call complete and total BS on that one. We can't even react to an Ebola scare and manage to successfully contain it within MONTHS, and you expect that every government in the world is suddenly going to hear, BELIEVE(that's a big one), and react, all in one day? Not a chance in hell of that happening. At best it would take a solid month before every government in the world would be taking action, and at worst, I could easily see it taking nearly 3 months before you manage to convince the more stubborn leaders that the dead are actually rising.

Sort of. I believe there are enough people who understand the concepts of such a thing that it wouldn't be too hard to convince individuals.

There would be inertia because bureaucracy takes a long time to get mobilized and any good idea that comes along without the right papers signed in triplicate gets actively punished. I believe this means that official response would go from 'calm down, ma'am' to 'send in hit squads and anyone who doesn't hit the dirt immediately when ordered gets shot A LOT, use call signs and set up check points, burn everything that stops moving' with enough speed to cause whiplash.

That's what I find interesting. What happens? In your estimation.


Sorta I guess. Could have also been some strange form of virus, didn't want to assume.


That was my faux pas. I was less clear than I meant to be.



Because there are one million types of zombies out there and each one follows different rules. You asked how it's really go down and in our world, the real world, dead flesh rots. Sure we can chuck that fact out along with the whole "Dead don't Rise" thing but if we're just going to throw every bit away that conforms to the real world then we're not actually answering what would really go down if the dead somehow started walking.

No, sir. The point of interest isn't anything about zombies, never has been, and is even evident from the phrasing in the OP. The point is what is a detailed report of the real world response; it could be omnidimensional malevolent colors who phase out of the deep astral and attack instead of zombies, and I could still ask about the real world because "how do real people react to such absurdity" is the point, not the zombies or colors or any other catalyst.



I'm sorry you feel it's being passive aggressive but I'm just not sure how you want people to actually answer you if you keep throwing things out to keep the zombies "a threat" when everyone has pretty much said they wouldn't be.

You're free to walk on by if this isn't to your taste. I haven't changed a thing, I've been redirecting focus by way of explanation, nothing more. But insinuations, backhanded apologies, you're clearly working on an entirely different set of acceptable parameters than I am. Rather than argue over the legitimacy of my question, it's probably best we just go out separate ways. Anything else by this point is flame bait and trolling.


What thought train inspired this thread SiuiS?

Just wondering about zombies vs. RL?

It's a game scenario. I'm not giving you the exact parameters because the part that I want feedback on is 'how specifically would the absurd zombie scenario be handle by people who think YouTube and Pinterest make them survival savvy?


The main bulk...ignores the fact that we live in a world where every arm chair youtuber, every twitter user and instagram user wouldn't be reporting on the sudden rising of the dead.

These are the same Internet people who actually believed that the California Bay Area was going to have a Purge where people could be lawless for 24 hours, right? These people are the hyper rational news machines we rely on in this emergency?


There would not be enough zombies under this scenario to be a serious threat. Possibly from a personal viewpoint, but not from that of society as a whole.

One month of terror and slaughter and fear is sufficient. How that month is contained is what I'm looking for. What foibles happen? How many "go about your day/duck and cover" messages come out? How many departments mis deploy resources on bad intel by following procedure and get people killed? How many departments get in trouble because their people don't follow procedure and begin to gun down zombies? How do the riots happen? Is it because zombies or in reaction to assumed government malfeasance?

"This would be solved quickly" is not a counterpoint. It's probably a given. Just... Show your work, y'know? Home in. Be less abstract. Surmise based on what information you have. There are tonnes of military pones around, I'm sure they have Opinions on how things would go down. That's what I was trying for with this;



Everyone agrees on two things. One, it's infeasible for an outbreak to last long and be an apocalyptic scenario. Two, it will take about a month or two to get a grip and fix everything.

What I'm looking at, is it's going to be a hellish forty five to sixty days before this is all taken care of. How does a local power coordinate with a higher power up to the level of nations to actually clamp down? That's the story I want to see, right now. That's the detail I want to see, y'know? :smallsmile:




Hmm, it wouldn't just be 150k though. SiuiS in her 2nd post modified the conditions to say that what kickstarts them rising from the grave would be a pulse of dark, negative supernatural energy that would affect corpses of an indeterminate time. So if it goes back as far as...a week, you have well over a million initial zombies. If you go back a month, you have nearly 5m. While 150k spread across the globe wouldn't be "that" bad, 5million could be just enough to tip the scales in the favor of the zombies. Especially considering the largest amount of corpses rising up would be in areas of greatest population(and therefore daily death). Places like New York would almost certainly fall in under 3 days. Then you just went from a mere 5mil, to 15m, just from one city. Multiply that by all the major cities in the world, and quite frankly, I don't see where the world manages to get it under control for a long freaking time. Even if Social Media was the saving grace Razade believes it would be, if a month worth of zombies rose up in the cemeteries of every major city in the world all at once, those cities would absolutely still collapse in short order. Maybe a few more survivors over-all, but that many zombies in such crowded places? Not a chance of them coming out intact.

Gosh, I didn't think of that somehow. :smalleek:

Man. If every existing corpse of sufficient freshness got up at any one point, that's a whole different kettle.


Well yeah, but that actually depends a lot on the specific scenario.

Are we doing a human vs human situation with the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop?

Or are we doing Human vs zombie?[/wuote]

Oh, neither. I'm not asking who wins. I'm asking what happens. Maybe that was where I erred? Is the OP written such that it looks like I want to know how victory is achieved by one side or the other?

[QUOTE=Razade;18777143]The Human v Human stuff would be just as boring and easy to deal with.

History is boring? Because that story is the entire point of this thread. If it doesn't interest you, then there's nothing for it. But it interests me.

[comicshorse]

This is the problem (IMHO) just because the government takes 6 months to deliver your passport doesn't mean the bureaucracy is as crippling in every department. Every day police, ambulances, and fire trucks respond to problems within minutes, because they are designed to operate quickly because lives are in danger. Obviously this depends on them being given the orders to respond to this unusual situation unusually (shoot zombies on sight ) but as pointed out when the decision makers are seeing the zombies in the cities they live in then they are likely to make those decisions promptly


[QUOTE] Man. If every existing corpse of sufficient freshness got up at any one point, that's a whole different kettle.

Even if they wake up they are still going to be buried in a wooden box, 6 feet under not a tenable position to start wiping out the human race from

[Douglas]

You might find CONPLAN 8888 some interesting reading (link (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2014/images/05/16/dod.zombie.apocalypse.plan.pdf)).

As a training exercise, the instructors set up a zombie apocalypse scenario and the trainees have to devise a plan to contain and counter it; this is the result. Eight types of zombies are considered, including Evil Magic Zombies as well as Chicken Zombies (yes, Chicken Zombies), so pretty much every variant is accounted for.
I was pretty sure the US DoD had a zombie apocalypse contingency plan on file somewhere, nice to see it confirmed. They have so many contingency plans on file, many of them from training exercises where fantastical scenarios get treated seriously, that I'd actually be a little surprised if any random thing we come up with does not match at least one of them.

[Bulldog Psion]

There would be inertia because bureaucracy takes a long time to get mobilized and any good idea that comes along without the right papers signed in triplicate gets actively punished. I believe this means that official response would go from 'calm down, ma'am' to 'send in hit squads and anyone who doesn't hit the dirt immediately when ordered gets shot A LOT, use call signs and set up check points, burn everything that stops moving' with enough speed to cause whiplash.

That's what I find interesting. What happens? In your estimation.

The thing is, that the police and military are already set up for containing and killing threats. You don't need a ton of paperwork in Washington for Constable John Q. Buzzcut of West Smathins, Vermont to grab his shotgun and blow away the weird guy trying to take a bite out of his next door neighbor's wife when she's out sunbathing. He'll just do it.

Likewise, on a larger scale, you don't need to build a whole new structure to get people out there kicking posterior and taking dog tags. There are already plenty of well-armed, well-trained people whose profession is exactly that. You've already got a ton of zombie killers prepared; you don't need to spend 5 years coming up with a Bureau of Zombie Affairs (BZA).

What you need is 1. authorization, which I think would come through pretty fast. To repeat my earlier statement, this is basically an invasion. You'd get authorization fast if an invasion of foreign soldiers was detected, so I don't see why this would be significantly different. 2. Information on the enemy, allowing a plan of hunting and attack. This would take a little longer, but it's kind of a "learn as you go" thing, too. Kill the zombies and do various stuff to the bodies, and see what sticks.

How would this go down in my opinion?

One morning, the POTUS is looking out the Oval Office window. He see a couple of super-ragged senior citizens out there grappling with a Secret Service man; one is seemingly gnawing on his tie, and the other is trying to sink their teeth into his calf. Eventually, he shoots both of them in desperation and staggers away, cursing the day he was born. This is the POTUS' first indication that something is amiss.

The POTUS gets a briefing about it a bit later and finds out that the two senior citizens attacked the guard for no reason. The preliminary coroner's examination is also strange; they show every sign of having been dead for six days before being shot. The President raises an eyebrow, tells the Secret Service to keep him briefed, and goes on with his day.

Early that afternoon, a worried looking FBI chief approaches him. "Mr. President, we have some unusual activity going on. The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, the military, and FEMA have been getting hundreds of calls from police stations across the country. Seems our two seniors weren't alone -- there has been a rash of biting attacks today across the whole U.S.. The calls are still coming in, in fact the volume seems to be picking up."

The POTUS notes this and asks to be kept abreast of the situation, then carries on with business.

An hour later he is approached again and informed that there are people shambling around in every major and most minor cities and townships, and biting people who approach them. There aren't very many at any one place, but they are very widespread. Some people have died from bite attacks and quite a few shamblers have been shot up by the police.

The POTUS gets a line to the heads of the DEA and the BATF. He asks if this could be caused by some new drug; the agencies send lab personnel over to check the two seniors shot on the lawn in the morning.

The nationwide terror threat is raised to orange.

Reports continue to pour in. The number of attacks is tailing off because the police have shot a lot of the suspects when they attacked investigating officers and refused to surrender, but clearly something unusual and highly threatening is underway.

The POTUS calls the Pentagon and finds out that a group of "biters" appeared near a facility where 6 soldiers killed in a helicopter crash during training were being kept. The POTUS and the Joint Chiefs who are available discuss the situation; they agree that this looks like some kind of weird disease outbreak or new form of terrorism. The U.S. military is put on high alert. Orders are issued to mobilize several units at various points around the country just in case.

Day 1 ends with efforts being made to collect as much information as possible about the situation. Homeland Security and BATF personnel are sent out to start collecting high quality intelligence on the ground.

Day 2, the numbers of attacks have fallen off sharply, but a lot of the zombies have now been shot. A few people were also killed. Some new ones also emerge. Law enforcement everywhere is now cruising in search of these people. Since they always attack and don't surrender, even more zombies are killed.

The populace has wind of this now and is getting antsy. Some homeless people are tragically shot.

By the end of the day, partial military units have been gathered and are practically ready for deployment.

From day 3 to 7, more information is gathered. A state of emergency is declared and some cities impose curfews. There is some rioting and panic, but itchy-trigger paranoia is the most common response. Once they got used to it, people would settle down a a bit.

So I think the police would be on it the first day and federal agents would be sent out for intelligence gathering. The first military would be available towards the end of day 2. And it would just proceed from there.


These are the same Internet people who actually believed that the California Bay Area was going to have a Purge where people could be lawless for 24 hours, right? These people are the hyper rational news machines we rely on in this emergency?

No, but the government doesn't read Reddit as its sole source of intelligence about what's happening in the country. There are police and minor federal officials everywhere. There are Park Service people, fire service people, post office personnel, police, FBI, National Guard, etc. etc. etc. All of these people have telephones, computers, and, presumably "feces just hit the fan" numbers they can call in case of riot, insurrection, terrorism, or invasion.

Every government on Earth has boots on the ground in most towns in its country. The government would be able to acquire medium to high quality information on the situation reliably, particularly as heavily-armed police stations are the points least likely to be overwhelmed by two or three corpses of homeless people who froze to death last night, lurching along in no very good shape.


One month of terror and slaughter and fear is sufficient.

Problem is, that if there is no zombie-to-person transmission, you won't have a month of terror and slaughter and fear. You'll have a zombie lurching around here being hit by a truck. 40 minutes later, another zombie 12 streets over bites several people before being shot to pieces by police. 2 hours after that, a pair of zombies accost some kids and actually manage to kill and partly eat one of them before the kid's dad smashes them into a broken pulp with an aluminum baseball bat.

There just aren't enough bodies lying around to rise as a credible horde. As I pointed out, there would probably be more gang shootings than zombie attacks on any given day in a major city.

[TheThan]

Secondly, everybody with access to a television, a movie theater, or a computer has seen at least one zombie flick, I daresay. And there are zombie books, zombie hoaxes, zombie discussion, zombie comics, on and on and on. The concept is extremely familiar, and it comes in so many flavors that there's a scenario that would fit with just about anyone.


You forgot ghost stories and legends… sorry just being nit-picky.


The Human v Human stuff would be just as boring and easy to deal with. The Zombies aren't going to go after vital services like water or really impact our ability to maintain them. And one of the biggest flaws of any Apcolypse movie is that they vastly lean on cynicism. If human beings were as rotten and self serving as the movies and books want to show we wouldn't HAVE zombie movies. Humans band together, it's what we do. We're a species conditioned to need other human interaction. Bad bad stuff happens to people who remove themselves from any form of human contact over a long period of time. We built towns to bring ourselves closer together. Sure there'd be looting and bands of people running around being bandits but that stuff wouldn't last long. We wouldn't descend into animals when our toys shut down. History and the preponderance of evidence simply does not support such a result.


I agree. But this is why most zombie stories are very small scale. Its five people held up in a farm house or in a mall or on the move somehow. Most of the time it’s not a group of people carving out a living in a post zombie world, we are not talking about fifty people living in a compound together. There is always interpersonal conflict within the group because that’s interesting. If everyone cooperated and got along then the focus of the movie would have to shift from the people to the zombies, and then we end up with eventual boredom as people will get tired of zombie brain splatter after a while. It’s also why all or most of the survivors are total strangers, because when you don’t know someone is a little hard to work with that stranger. When two type “A” personalities end up in a survival situation together, they’re probably going to butt heads until someone either dies or yields to the other. That’s conflict and that’s what people want.

[Razade]

I agree. But this is why most zombie stories are very small scale. Its five people held up in a farm house or in a mall or on the move somehow. Most of the time it’s not a group of people carving out a living in a post zombie world, we are not talking about fifty people living in a compound together. There is always interpersonal conflict within the group because that’s interesting. If everyone cooperated and got along then the focus of the movie would have to shift from the people to the zombies, and then we end up with eventual boredom as people will get tired of zombie brain splatter after a while. It’s also why all or most of the survivors are total strangers, because when you don’t know someone is a little hard to work with that stranger. When two type “A” personalities end up in a survival situation together, they’re probably going to butt heads until someone either dies or yields to the other. That’s conflict and that’s what people want.

You don't say. No, I completely understand why Zombie Movies are the way they are in the media. They're just to unrealistic for me to suspend my disbelief. They go so far against what has and would actually happen I can't take it at all seriously. Same with any other Apocalyptic stuff. To me the "five strangers who hate one another" aspect is boring. It's tired and it's been done to death.

[TheThan]

You don't say. No, I completely understand why Zombie Movies are the way they are in the media. They're just to unrealistic for me to suspend my disbelief. They go so far against what has and would actually happen I can't take it at all seriously. Same with any other Apocalyptic stuff. To me the "five strangers who hate one another" aspect is boring. It's tired and it's been done to death.

Well you’re clearly in the minority, as enough people still love that conflict. i agree that it can become a headache especially in scenarios where there is a clear chain of command, and the characters have no reason not to work together.

Anyway, in order for society to crumble enough for an apocalyptic scenario to happen, two things must first occur:

1: the event is cataclysmic enough to wipe out a large section of the population
2: the event is such that a nation’s infrastructure collapses.

With a reduced population and no more infrastructure to carry information (and other vital things), then regaining any sort of large scale government will be quite difficult (not impossible, but hard). Instead people will have to band together in smaller communities. It’s not unfeasible that in this situation, a suburban neighborhood forms a group community for mutual protection, sharing resources and surviving together. Usually there will be one strong leader to make sure things get done. I can see the same for an urban block, an inner city gang or just about anyone that are stuck together.

With zombies, I don’t see that happening unless it’s a virus type infection and living beings are turned into zombies. I’m talking about a situation where a huge section of the population suddenly starts eating brains. This would cause infrastructure to shut down as those people that run them are either turned, or flee for their lives.

Now if it’s a single witchdoctor or some such animating a graveyard then he’s not going to get so many that authorities won’t be able to eventually contain it (even if it takes them a bit to realize there is a real threat and not a hoax). Even in Night of the Living Dead, the zombie threat was effectively over by morning, as the locals banded together and started re-killing zombies.

[Razade]

Well you’re clearly in the minority, as enough people still love that conflict. i agree that it can become a headache especially in scenarios where there is a clear chain of command, and the characters have no reason not to work together.

I never understood why this was used as a counter-argument. What does it matter if I'm in the minority when I'm talking purely about my own opinion? I don't care if there are a large group of people who like it, good for them. The Appeal to Popularity doesn't give the thing merit. Ask flies, they'll tell you crap tastes great.


Anyway, in order for society to crumble enough for an apocalyptic scenario to happen, two things must first occur:

1: the event is cataclysmic enough to wipe out a large section of the population
2: the event is such that a nation’s infrastructure collapses.

And by "Society" you mean "Society" as you describe it and as we currently have it. I don't think I have to exhaust any amount of time to explain why none of this matters.


With a reduced population and no more infrastructure to carry information (and other vital things), then regaining any sort of large scale government will be quite difficult (not impossible, but hard). Instead people will have to band together in smaller communities. It’s not unfeasible that in this situation, a suburban neighborhood forms a group community for mutual protection, sharing resources and surviving together. Usually there will be one strong leader to make sure things get done. I can see the same for an urban block, an inner city gang or just about anyone that are stuck together.

Apparently I do. Society crumbling as we have it now does not mean the end of society. It merely would be a restructuring. Not only is it feasible for population centers to band together it is certain. We as a species are a social creature. We have, over our long lives since leaving the African Savannah, grown closer and closer and closer. Tribes move to towns. Towns move to city States. City States move to Countries. Countries move to "Nations". So on and so forth. All history has ever shown us is the prediliction of the human species to grow into a closer knit organization save for the rather small population who shun such human interaction. Hermits however are just that. They're not the norm, they're oddities in the social structure. The power structures would change of course but so what? Society would be maintained.


With zombies, I don’t see that happening unless it’s a virus type infection and living beings are turned into zombies. I’m talking about a situation where a huge section of the population suddenly starts eating brains. This would cause infrastructure to shut down as those people that run them are either turned, or flee for their lives.

Now if it’s a single witchdoctor or some such animating a graveyard then he’s not going to get so many that authorities won’t be able to eventually contain it (even if it takes them a bit to realize there is a real threat and not a hoax). Even in Night of the Living Dead, the zombie threat was effectively over by morning, as the locals banded together and started re-killing zombies.

We at least agree on this point. Zombies are generally not a threat. Even as a virus the spread of Ebola in an industrialized nation should show how poor transmission would be. Especially as Zombies generally need close contact to spread their infection and if society crumbled to nothing it'd be even harder to spread with population zones spreading out.

[SiuiS]

This is the problem (IMHO) just because the government takes 6 months to deliver your passport doesn't mean the bureaucracy is as crippling in every department. Every day police, ambulances, and fire trucks respond to problems within minutes, because they are designed to operate quickly because lives are in danger. Obviously this depends on them being given the orders to respond to this unusual situation unusually (shoot zombies on sight ) but as pointed out when the decision makers are seeing the zombies in the cities they live in then they are likely to make those decisions promptly


This is true. The inherent issue here is authorization from an executive agency. I guarantee every single police officer would know what to do, personally, in such a situation. I also know that half the good ideas are against regs.

You either have a branch of people following protocol to avoid issues or you have a free-shooting paramilitary authority cult acting without oversight. Both contribute quite quickly to apocalyptic scenarios.

For reference, the U.S. And it's troubles with hurricane Katrina qualify as apocalyptic scenario.


Even if they wake up they are still going to be buried in a wooden box, 6 feet under not a tenable position to start wiping out the human race from

There are a lot of bodies above ground. Burial and cremation can take weeks to process. Again, bureaucracy.



Likewise, on a larger scale, you don't need to build a whole new structure to get people out there kicking posterior and taking dog tags. There are already plenty of well-armed, well-trained people whose profession is exactly that. You've already got a ton of zombie killers prepared; you don't need to spend 5 years coming up with a Bureau of Zombie Affairs (BZA).

I know. I'm looking for how they would maintain that order and authority though. You have civilians who feel they aren't doing anything, and you have officers who just want to go home and bug out with their family (or go Rambo with their survivalist buddies). Again, saying "they maintain order" is cool, but how would they do it?



How would this go down in my opinion?


I appreciate that, thanks. Answers a lot.


Problem is, that if there is no zombie-to-person transmission, you won't have a month of terror and slaughter and fear.

Ah, a misunderstanding. No transmission means everyone is infected, as opposed to infection being caused by zombies. That's a "there is no virus, or but, or mechanical phenomenon, or anything any scientist will be able to isolate – although they'll try like hell". No cause. No cure. Everything else about zombies remains the same, just not explained. A bite is still lethal for no raisin, like most zombie bites are. A bite means you turn within minutes of death at most, like most zombie bites do.

You'll just turn anyway if you die somehow else. Indeterminate time, but only because it's less immediately relevant (I thought, will have to rethink that).

Don't know if that changes anything or not, but.



Anyway, in order for society to crumble enough for an apocalyptic scenario to happen, two things must first occur:

1: the event is cataclysmic enough to wipe out a large section of the population
2: the event is such that a nation’s infrastructure collapses.

note that a temporary collapse qualifies. I expect people will short term panic, mid term start getting their stuff together. I don't even think a complete infrastructure loss is needed; a shutdown that leaves cells of functioning society works if the cells are small enough.


I never understood why this was used as a counter-argument.

Because your opinion isn't relevant. In a thread that's "pretend x could happen" the opinion that x couldn't happen isn't useful. We know that, it's why we have to pretend.

Failing because of specific human patterns on the concrete scale is fine, detail them! Failing because the genre conventions are atupid and the idea is stupid and the basis is stupid is just peeing in my Cheerios. :smallfrown:

[TheThan]

I never understood why this was used as a counter-argument. What does it matter if I'm in the minority when I'm talking purely about my own opinion? I don't care if there are a large group of people who like it, good for them. The Appeal to Popularity doesn't give the thing merit. Ask flies, they'll tell you crap tastes great.


I’m not actually trying to make a counter argument. Just an observation that you’re tastes run opposite to the tastes that most people who enjoy zombie movies share, that’s all.



And by "Society" you mean "Society" as you describe it and as we currently have it. I don't think I have to exhaust any amount of time to explain why none of this matters.

Yes, maybe I should have been more clear by saying “our current western society”. But I think that’s splitting hairs a little.


Apparently I do. Society crumbling as we have it now does not mean the end of society. It merely would be a restructuring. Not only is it feasible for population centers to band together it is certain. We as a species are a social creature. We have, over our long lives since leaving the African Savannah, grown closer and closer and closer. Tribes move to towns. Towns move to city States. City States move to Countries. Countries move to "Nations". So on and so forth. All history has ever shown us is the prediliction of the human species to grow into a closer knit organization save for the rather small population who shun such human interaction. Hermits however are just that. They're not the norm, they're oddities in the social structure. The power structures would change of course but so what? Society would be maintained.

I agree. It’s not a matter of “if” it’s a matter of “how long will it take”, depending on the exact nature of the disaster, it may take some time for humanity to really start rebuilding. Small isolated pockets will spring up quickly, but it may take a long time for those pockets to grow into something “worthwhile”.



We at least agree on this point. Zombies are generally not a threat. Even as a virus the spread of Ebola in an industrialized nation should show how poor transmission would be. Especially as Zombies generally need close contact to spread their infection and if society crumbled to nothing it'd be even harder to spread with population zones spreading out.

I think we’re actually agreeing on more than it seems. With a bit of common sense, ebola should kill itself off as quarantine procedures take effect. But people are stupid, and we knowingly fly known infected people from where they are to an area that does not have it, potentially spreading it. We also allow people who have been in those areas access to other places that don’t have an outbreak, again spreading it. I actually slap my head and wonder why this is done, are people just that careless, stupid or self centered that he just doesn’t care about potentially killing others?

Now ebola is something we can’t see and fight back with conventional weapons. So its spread is much more likely, especially among populations with little to no education (particularly health education). As soon as zombies are realized, they’re going to re-die, and re-die hard.

Humanity has the power to control an outbreak of Ebola (whether we have the wisdom and smarts to do it is another debate), and that’s something we can’t see, smell, taste or touch, but zombies, we can see, smell, taste (eww) and touch, containing zombies should be a much easier task. I'm sure if Medieval Europeans realized the black plague was caused by flees on the back of rats, they would have done something about it before it killed 30%-60 % of Europe's population.




note that a temporary collapse qualifies. I expect people will short term panic, mid term start getting their stuff together. I don't even think a complete infrastructure loss is needed; a shutdown that leaves cells of functioning society works if the cells are small enough.


Yeah but a pre-existing government should be able to take control of the situation before things get out of hand in a temporary collapse. The locals that got hit by the event usually don’t have to rebuild a society along with their homes. They just pick up the pieces and keep going.

That’s what made Katrina so bad and such an embarrassment. The local and federal government knew it was coming days in advance, and didn’t do enough (or anything) to reduce the after effects of the hurricane and there were alot more people in serious trouble than there should have been after the city was destroyed.

[Razade]

I’m not actually trying to make a counter argument. Just an observation that you’re tastes run opposite to the tastes that most people who enjoy zombie movies share, that’s all.

Absolutely, but people are free to enjoy what they enjoy.



Yes, maybe I should have been more clear by saying “our current western society”. But I think that’s splitting hairs a little.

It matters though.


I agree. It’s not a matter of “if” it’s a matter of “how long will it take”, depending on the exact nature of the disaster, it may take some time for humanity to really start rebuilding. Small isolated pockets will spring up quickly, but it may take a long time for those pockets to grow into something “worthwhile”.

A real Zombie Outbreak would be a speedbump. A Magical JuJu zombie outbreak might be more of a problem but if it's killable it won't be a problem. At least not in the U.S.


I think we’re actually agreeing on more than it seems. With a bit of common sense, ebola should kill itself off as quarantine procedures take effect. But people are stupid, and we knowingly fly known infected people from where they are to an area that does not have it, potentially spreading it. We also allow people who have been in those areas access to other places that don’t have an outbreak, again spreading it. I actually slap my head and wonder why this is done, are people just that careless, stupid or self centered that he just doesn’t care about potentially killing others?

Well, in the case of the Ebola outbreak two people in the U.S caught the virus, not sure about how many caught it in Spain save for the one nun or in Germany, but we send people elsewhere because in this case treatment is better and they have a better chance of survival. Also in the case of the aid workers, because they're our citizens and we don't leave our citizens to die of a virus in a foreign nation just because they went over to help. As for why we can't stop people from traveling....the world is to interconnected. Someone can get a flight from Country X to Country Y but Country Z won't take flights from Country X. Dude from Country X flies from Country Y to Country Z because that's not on the ban list. You can't stop it. It won't help. You can't stop all travel from every country just on the off chance you keep someone out from a country you don't want in your borders. And we're just talking about flying. You'd have to close the physical borders to. It's not practical.


Now ebola is something we can’t see and fight back with conventional weapons. So its spread is much more likely, especially among populations with little to no education (particularly health education). As soon as zombies are realized, they’re going to re-die, and re-die hard.

The transmission for the zombie virus is also much worse than Ebola which is very bad at transmitting itself to begin with.


Humanity has the power to control an outbreak of Ebola (whether we have the wisdom and smarts to do it is another debate), and that’s something we can’t see, smell, taste or touch, but zombies, we can see, smell, taste (eww) and touch, containing zombies should be a much easier task. I'm sure if Medieval Europeans realized the black plague was caused by flees on the back of rats, they would have done something about it before it killed 30%-60 % of Europe's population.

Absolutely, considering that other than nations who can't control other aspects of their country are the only ones struggling to keep track of the virus. A zombie virus won't be that hard to contain even in those areas really. Not sure about the Black Death thing, there were a lot of factors outside just the vector not being known. It still wouldn't have killed off as many as it did if they knew to protect against it.



Yeah but a pre-existing government should be able to take control of the situation before things get out of hand in a temporary collapse. The locals that got hit by the event usually don’t have to rebuild a society along with their homes. They just pick up the pieces and keep going.

That’s what made Katrina so bad and such an embarrassment. The local and federal government knew it was coming days in advance, and didn’t do enough (or anything) to reduce the after effects of the hurricane and there were alot more people in serious trouble than there should have been after the city was destroyed.

A Zombie outbreak wouldn't destroy much of the infrastructure. It's one of those things I don't get in zombie moves. Flaming cars on the side of the road, water and power lines being down and the like. It assumes a level of devastation well beyond the means of most zombies. Unless the government starts to bomb the crap out of random civilian centers life wouldn't even feel the speed bum.

[Eldan]

Burning corpses might not work everywhere, since the energy (or wood) requirements are actually quite high. But depending on the requirements for the particular zombie, people might just need to get less squeamish and take a machete to dead people before burial. Cut off the head (plus the legs and arms to make sure), then put them back together in a suit so they look nice. Done.

[Bulldog Psion]

Burning corpses might not work everywhere, since the energy (or wood) requirements are actually quite high. But depending on the requirements for the particular zombie, people might just need to get less squeamish and take a machete to dead people before burial. Cut off the head (plus the legs and arms to make sure), then put them back together in a suit so they look nice. Done.

Exactly. That would pretty much do it right there.

The "buried in a sturdy coffin 6 feet under several hundred pounds of compacted soil" would put a crimp in a lot of risings, too. :smallwink: Unless, of course, we're talking about some kind of super-strong hyperzombies, in which case all bets are off.

As for society collapsing because people want to survive -- I just don't see the "society collapsing" thing really being on the table. I mean, Europe was devastated in World War 2, whole cities burned down or flattened by bombs, armies rolling through slaughtering, and the response of the populace wasn't to run to the woods, dig burrows, and start shooting each other for a winter supply of "sapiens jerky."

They pretty much tried to keep everything going despite the horrors being visited on them. A few zombies lurching around being run over by trucks or shot by cops and armed citizens is pretty mild compared to that kind of stuff.

[Erloas]

Well, in the case of the Ebola outbreak two people in the U.S caught the virus, not sure about how many caught it in Spain save for the one nun or in Germany, but we send people elsewhere because in this case treatment is better and they have a better chance of survival. Also in the case of the aid workers, because they're our citizens and we don't leave our citizens to die of a virus in a foreign nation just because they went over to help. As for why we can't stop people from traveling....the world is to interconnected.
Lets look at this another way though. We had 2 aid workers in Africa contract the virus, get home and get treated. That seems like the system is working well.
On the other hand we had someone that was exposed, flew here, went to the doctor and was send away without them ever realizing he had Ebola. He potentially exposed a lot of people over just 2-3 days (over the weekend) before he went back in and they figured it out. He infected two health care workers in that hospital. This was months after the Ebola outbreak, after the hospitals were supposed to be "on high alert" for Ebola, after they were screening passengers flying out of Africa to the US. This was also in a very large and well equipped hospital in a major metro area that has an international airport, it wasn't like it was some small regional hospital in a small town.

Then lets take the response to that. They had individual governors mandating their own rules in airports in their states. Including quarantining people who had no signs at all for a month if they came from an area they might have been exposed to Ebola. Luckily that was a fairly small number of people but it still caused a decent amount of social unrest, especially among the health care fields.


Lets extrapolate that a bit. They know Ebola well, they know how to treat it, how to recognize the signs early, and at what point they become contagious. They know how it is transfered.

Even being as genre savvy as we are in this thread and with some 4th wall knowledge of the situation, we don't know exactly what the abilities of these zombies are, we don't know what it takes to kill them (fire only? destroy the brain?), we just learned several days in that they can't be cured and that while a zombie bite is essentially highly venomous and kills quickly, zombies also pop up where there have been no other cases, where they have not been exposed to anyone else. Some zombies outbreaks can be cured, some can't according to the genre.

How long would scientists take trying to figure out a cure before the government decides it just has to start killing all of them? Even people with known incurable deadly conditions aren't easily let go by their loved ones. See again Ebola, even if it can be cured sometimes a lot of people did, and still are, hiding their loved ones from the authorities and exposing themselves to do it.

Who is going to go in for a flu check if they are likely to be quarantined for a long time? (we don't know if there are any obvious symptoms to pre-zombie in the first few days).





For my own set of outbreak scenarios, I'll give a few.

You'll have quite a few small towns and rural areas with very low death rates and they'll never see a zombie until the basics are figured out, they'll have enough provisions that they'll be fine.

You have some other similar type areas where they were just unlucky, a bad car crash or some other sort of thing on the first day or two will cause the small police force and medical care facilities to be taken out by a couple zombies before they even know the outbreak has started. Also since it is a small town and everyone knows everyone else there is a lot less gun-ho action to take out the people that turned. You probably don't loose everyone in these areas but you'll loose a lot that don't bunker down at the first signs of trouble.

You'll see a lot of the same thing as the latter case in more 3rd world countries. You'll see the drug cartels, terrorist groups, and other sorts of "organized" armed groups outside the government use it as a cover to make advances and take out those standing in their way. The collateral damage will cause huge zombie number spikes. Less constrained leaders will very aggressively take out cities and civilians in the process and little will be left but the armed groups themselves.

In big cities you'll see a lot of different things. Some are much better placed to weather out this than others. LA, being so very dependent on outside power, water, and food, probably falls into chaos very quickly. Many heartland cities are close enough to their resources that they can handle the human needs enough to keep it falling into chaos. They loose a decent number in the early stages when things are still being figured out, but mostly get things under control.

You'll see very heavy tourist areas, such as Miami and Las Vegas drop into chaos quickly. There are a lot of people with no where to go very quickly turning to panic. They have none of their processions, they have no guns to easily and safely defend themselves, they don't even have a day's worth of stored food. So many people also flew, the airports have all been shut down as they are still trying to figure out the transmission vectors for the outbreak and don't want it to spread, so they have no way to leave. People stealing cars and food in an attempt to get away just adds to the chaos, obviously some of them make it out but it just makes it all the worse for the ones that don't. The fighting and the fear get people killed by other people, the zombie numbers get high and people get swarmed without guns. The police are more worried about their friends and family that they don't respond to the tourist areas, where they have no ties, until things get out of hand and when they see that they fall back to protect their families and avoid the really dense areas.

Some of the power grid fails for a variety of reasons.
Hover Dam goes down because of tourists and the chaos in Las Vegas. Someone going off the road hits a power line and takes out a transformer. It is a fixable problem, but not one the workers are willing to try until things have settled down a lot.
The more superstitious parts of the country go down because people are afraid to go to work. Some parts are destroyed because the evils of the industrialized world is what caused nature/god/aliens/etc. to release this wraith down upon us.

Then there is the "normal" power outages that happen every year (http://www.energyblogs.com/ericcharette/index.cfm/2013/4/24/Power-Outage-Statistics-in-the-United-States) and any that happen during this are not being fixed because of the chaos. Between luck, contingency plans, and general isolation in the power grid various areas are able to keep their areas going.

Guns and control control are a mixed blessing. Some areas are able to easily defend themselves because of the guns they have. Others those guns turn into armed power seekers, and shoot first and run away types that kill the healthy and undead alike. The areas with much fewer guns there are less vigilantes and the chaos they cause but also safe defense for the common people as well.

The cities with large marine and army bases do a very good job of locking everything down fairly quickly. They have the right types of weapons, the numbers, and the training to handle this. There are losses but things don't drop into chaos. Navy and airforce bases themselves are well protected but they don't have the right types of weapons or the numbers of trained combat troops to protect an entire city, except the ones in relatively small cities which do have the numbers.

It takes a few months for scientists to decide it is incurable, that anyone that dies turns regardless of exposure to existing zombies, and the purge starts in earnest. The military and police go from only killing to protect survivors and when engaged to wiping them out on site. You have outbreaks of normal diseases that are a lot deadlier than we are used to simply because we don't have medicines stockpiled like we used to and there is still a lot of fear and misinformation going around.

Other countries are mirrors of some places in the USA. Some make it out ok and others are almost completely overrun.

[Razade]

Lets look at this another way though. We had 2 aid workers in Africa contract the virus, get home and get treated. That seems like the system is working well.
On the other hand we had someone that was exposed, flew here, went to the doctor and was send away without them ever realizing he had Ebola. He potentially exposed a lot of people over just 2-3 days (over the weekend) before he went back in and they figured it out. He infected two health care workers in that hospital. This was months after the Ebola outbreak, after the hospitals were supposed to be "on high alert" for Ebola, after they were screening passengers flying out of Africa to the US. This was also in a very large and well equipped hospital in a major metro area that has an international airport, it wasn't like it was some small regional hospital in a small town.

Naw man, that's both the systems working with a hiccup. Because again, only two other people caught the virus from one person who slipped through the cracks. Two. Not twenty. Not two thousand. Two. Less people caught the virus than were brought into the country with said virus. The response at the Texas Hospital was a momentary lapse in control and it was corrected. If the disease was perhaps more communicable we'd have a problem but luckily Ebola is very bad at transmission even if it's very good at killing. Which brings us to a zombie virus, which generally requires a bite to be spread. We can go through every iteration of the zombie virus to find one that spreads faster but most require some form of body fluid contact between host and vector. Just like Ebola.


Then lets take the response to that. They had individual governors mandating their own rules in airports in their states. Including quarantining people who had no signs at all for a month if they came from an area they might have been exposed to Ebola. Luckily that was a fairly small number of people but it still caused a decent amount of social unrest, especially among the health care fields.

And?


Lets extrapolate that a bit. They know Ebola well, they know how to treat it, how to recognize the signs early, and at what point they become contagious. They know how it is transfered.

Yes. A here to unknown disease that can bring the dead back to life would sure be a stumper. What's your point? You think much travel is going to happen when an army of the dead start rising from their graves worldwide? Doubtful. That's the time borders are shut down all over the globe. Or at least massively restricted.


Even being as genre savvy as we are in this thread and with some 4th wall knowledge of the situation, we don't know exactly what the abilities of these zombies are, we don't know what it takes to kill them (fire only? destroy the brain?), we just learned several days in that they can't be cured and that while a zombie bite is essentially highly venomous and kills quickly, zombies also pop up where there have been no other cases, where they have not been exposed to anyone else. Some zombies outbreaks can be cured, some can't according to the genre.

I'm still going about this as if the zombies follow the laws of physics and reality because that's just how the world works man. Doesn't matter if the zombies can't be cured, what rational person would think that a dead person can be cured? And if the virus is so fast at killing it won't take long for word of mouth from survivors to get the word out. Kill infected before they turn and burn the bodies. It's the only way.


How long would scientists take trying to figure out a cure before the government decides it just has to start killing all of them? Even people with known incurable deadly conditions aren't easily let go by their loved ones. See again Ebola, even if it can be cured sometimes a lot of people did, and still are, hiding their loved ones from the authorities and exposing themselves to do it.

Won't matter. People aren't going to listen to the dictates of a President or the CDC when the dead are roaming. It'll be a free for all. And again, if the virus kills so swiftly they won't be holding on to their loved ones for very long. This is the problem, this isn't a situation where you get your cake and get to eat it too. A Zombie Virus is a game changer because it breaks the very understanding of what we know. The dead don't rise up. Even the uneducated and less genre savvy aren't going to hesitate when something like this comes along. This isn't the flu or even Ebola. This is something far far worse but also with a much much easier fix. Shoot the zombies. Don't get bit. You'll lose some people along the way but the Zombie Plague isn't an unseen vector. You need zombies to make more zombies. No zombies, no problem,


Who is going to go in for a flu check if they are likely to be quarantined for a long time? (we don't know if there are any obvious symptoms to pre-zombie in the first few days).


Plenty of people in an industrialized nation. Occurrences of hold outs from medical care are outliers and amongst the poor. The wealthy and middle class who can afford health care have a much higher rate of going to the hospital.

[Erloas]

Naw man, that's both the systems working with a hiccup. Because again, only two other people caught the virus from one person who slipped through the cracks. Two. Not twenty. Not two thousand. Two. Less people caught the virus than were brought into the country with said virus. The response at the Texas Hospital was a momentary lapse in control and it was corrected. If the disease was perhaps more communicable we'd have a problem but luckily Ebola is very bad at transmission even if it's very good at killing. Which brings us to a zombie virus, which generally requires a bite to be spread. We can go through every iteration of the zombie virus to find one that spreads faster but most require some form of body fluid contact between host and vector. Just like Ebola.
That was one hiccup, sure. One with months of time to prepare for it, and the *only* one that happened. It isn't like there were 2-3 other cases of someone coming in on an airplane, getting found on the USA side and quarantined. The one and only time they had the chance to catch it right and they failed. Being that the undead start popping up everywhere all at once, that you're going to have 1000 cases all at once without *any* warning ahead of time and a few "hiccups" now and then is all it is going to take.



Yes. A here to unknown disease that can bring the dead back to life would sure be a stumper. What's your point? You think much travel is going to happen when an army of the dead start rising from their graves worldwide? Doubtful. That's the time borders are shut down all over the globe. Or at least massively restricted.

...

I'm still going about this as if the zombies follow the laws of physics and reality because that's just how the world works man. Doesn't matter if the zombies can't be cured, what rational person would think that a dead person can be cured? And if the virus is so fast at killing it won't take long for word of mouth from survivors to get the word out. Kill infected before they turn and burn the bodies. It's the only way.
But thats the thing, it doesn't have to travel, it is already there. You can't close your boarders and shut down all forms of travel and contain this because as soon as someone dies of a heart attack, car crash, getting trampled by a mob running away or trying to get the last bits of food from the store, you have a new zombie in a place that may never have seen a zombie before.

A guy dieing from a heart attack is probably also going to look *almost* normal, it isn't going to be nearly as obvious until much later (if they even decompose, the dark energy reanimating them might be just as good at keeping them from decomposing as our normal living energy is).
In the first day (or longer) you go to help someone that gets in a car crash and the fact that they are moving is going to seem like they aren't dead yet, not that they are undead. The heart attack is the same way. The really obvious ones where someone is mangled completely, not so much. But so many others aren't going to stand out as much. Someone gets shot in a gang fight and walk into a hospital bleeding they're going to rush to help, they aren't going to assume they actually died on the way over in the back of their friends car and are actually a zombie.

Even the already dead, it has routinely documented of people actually being alive when they were thought dead. It doesn't happen much in the USA any more but it still happens in other parts of the world. They used to hang bells in a cemetery with strings leading into the casket in case their loved one was actually alive so they could ring the bell for someone to rescue them. It is much less common now but those beliefs are still there. And more importantly, the desire to believe your loved one isn't actually dead, that they can be saved and come back, is very strong even in the developed world.

Now that might all happens months, maybe even weeks after. But in the first day? At least the first few days, people aren't going to jump to OMG its a zombie. That leads to more deaths, more zombies, and most importantly of all, more panic.

Won't matter. People aren't going to listen to the dictates of a President or the CDC when the dead are roaming. It'll be a free for all. And again, if the virus kills so swiftly they won't be holding on to their loved ones for very long. This is the problem, this isn't a situation where you get your cake and get to eat it too. A Zombie Virus is a game changer because it breaks the very understanding of what we know. The dead don't rise up. Even the uneducated and less genre savvy aren't going to hesitate when something like this comes along. This isn't the flu or even Ebola. This is something far far worse but also with a much much easier fix. Shoot the zombies. Don't get bit. You'll lose some people along the way but the Zombie Plague isn't an unseen vector. You need zombies to make more zombies. No zombies, no problem.
And I agree with the first part, people aren't going to listen to the CDC or President or their local government/police. That is where the civil unrest leads, that is where the chaos comes from, that is the how and why of the collapse.

As for the second part, that is just completely ignoring the premise of the question. You do get more zombies even if all of the other zombies are dead. When anyone dies for any reason they become a zombie, they don't have to be bit, they don't have to have ever even seen a zombie, they turn. It doesn't matter if it is NYC or some small town of 10 people in the middle of Alaska, they die and they turn.

And has been mentioned, people are pretty bad at killing without tools.
And according to the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/interactives/guns/ownership.html) only about 32% of households own guns (the per-capita rate for the US is much higher but skewed by the fact that most gun owners own many guns). Meaning most people have no good way of defending themselves from zombies at range. Fighting off a person with a baseball bat or golf club might be pretty easy, but that is because they feel pain, a zombie that doesn't feel pain isn't going to care that you hit him in the arm or leg. And having trained a lot of people to fight in the SCA, I can tell you most people don't have very good aim with hand-held weapons and the mechanics to swing at the head take a while to develop well. I can also tell you that most people get tired of swinging pretty quickly and need a lot of rest after just short amounts of fighting. Those are all limitations the zombies don't have, they have no fear, they feel no pain, they don't get tired, and their "target zone" is orders of magnitude larger than the person fighting them has.

Considering how many people have trouble even running a 5k, I would actually say our lazy lifestyle (and lack of survival and outdoor skills) would put a huge amount of the population very much at risk.

I think you would have a pretty high survival rate, but I also think you would have a high enough causality rate to cause many places to fall into chaos. The zombies wouldn't win but the chaos they caused and the time required to get things under control and back to anything even approaching normalcy would be a long time.

[Razade]

That was one hiccup, sure. One with months of time to prepare for it, and the *only* one that happened. It isn't like there were 2-3 other cases of someone coming in on an airplane, getting found on the USA side and quarantined. The one and only time they had the chance to catch it right and they failed. Being that the undead start popping up everywhere all at once, that you're going to have 1000 cases all at once without *any* warning ahead of time and a few "hiccups" now and then is all it is going to take.

But there was. There were reports in New Mexico, there were reports in California. There were reports in Atlanta and New York. There were a ton of people who came to the U.S via plane who might have had the virus and the places that did went into lockdown. As for the zombies, you're going to have 1000 popping up in a much wider area. Not just airports over the country but morgues and graveyards and places like that. The spread will make it rather hard for them to be an issue.


But thats the thing, it doesn't have to travel, it is already there. You can't close your boarders and shut down all forms of travel and contain this because as soon as someone dies of a heart attack, car crash, getting trampled by a mob running away or trying to get the last bits of food from the store, you have a new zombie in a place that may never have seen a zombie before.

I'm not sure why you're expecting panics to the point of looting. More than just myself have pointed out that there isn't suddenly going to be a mob of undead wandering the streets. Maybe a light throng but there isn't going to be anything like what you see in the movies if they all suddenly started rising. And I agree that it doesn't matter if we shut down the boarders, but it's likely to still happen. Anyone who has a virus for Zombies isn't going to be moving. We'll also address why Zombies aren't much of a threat down below.


A guy dieing from a heart attack is probably also going to look *almost* normal, it isn't going to be nearly as obvious until much later (if they even decompose, the dark energy reanimating them might be just as good at keeping them from decomposing as our normal living energy is).

It might. There's no real reason to grant it that assumption but playing along it doesn't really matter. People don't stand around when random people try gnawing their arm off. And unless the "Dark Energy" somehow grants the new zombie some inhuman strength and speed the dead guy isn't going to be a threat. As you point out below (and as I've pointed out like every post) humans are lousy with killing without tools. Makes Zombies not all that big a problem when they're just shambling corpses animated by some fell power.


In the first day (or longer) you go to help someone that gets in a car crash and the fact that they are moving is going to seem like they aren't dead yet, not that they are undead. The heart attack is the same way. The really obvious ones where someone is mangled completely, not so much. But so many others aren't going to stand out as much. Someone gets shot in a gang fight and walk into a hospital bleeding they're going to rush to help, they aren't going to assume they actually died on the way over in the back of their friends car and are actually a zombie.

Unless the person had a heart attack outside a hospital it'll be pretty clear that something is up. People don't die in hospitals and walk around very often. Especially when they're declared dead and brought to the morgue where they're trapped inside a cold locker that they have 0 chance of breaking out of. Same with people who somehow die in a car accident (without being mangled. A pretty cool feat for them) because people in industrialized locations don't leave corpses laying around long enough for them to rot. Unless the zombies animate instantly which the OP specifies these don't. Zombies don't just sit all friendly in the back, they attack and try to eat you as well so you either have some very mild mannered zombies or you're assuming people are just going to sit around and let themselves get attacked by a flailing human like Starwulf does and that is absurd.


Even the already dead, it has routinely documented of people actually being alive when they were thought dead. It doesn't happen much in the USA any more but it still happens in other parts of the world. They used to hang bells in a cemetery with strings leading into the casket in case their loved one was actually alive so they could ring the bell for someone to rescue them. It is much less common now but those beliefs are still there. And more importantly, the desire to believe your loved one isn't actually dead, that they can be saved and come back, is very strong even in the developed world.

Yes, misreports of death do happen. A lot of those same said misreported deaths also follow up with the person dying inside the morgue storage area or under six feet of earth. This isn't a point in your favor I'm afraid. The "not wanting loved ones to be dead" may happen, I certainly don't know anyone in the developed world who would get told "Your dad is dead" then a few days later see him shambling around trying to catch pigeons to eat and think "It's a miracle!". You have to assume people are just infantile or brain dead for half this stuff. I don't assume that. And if people -are- that naive then I guess they deserve what they get.


Now that might all happens months, maybe even weeks after. But in the first day? At least the first few days, people aren't going to jump to OMG its a zombie. That leads to more deaths, more zombies, and most importantly of all, more panic.

There will probably be some level of panic in the normal population. Luckily we, in the U.S, have a highly militarized police force and the national guard to make sure the population is safe. Safer.


And I agree with the first part, people aren't going to listen to the CDC or President or their local government/police. That is where the civil unrest leads, that is where the chaos comes from, that is the how and why of the collapse.

See the above. Martial Law is going to take effect very swiftly. There will not be enough civil unrest to topple a country like France or the U.K.


As for the second part, that is just completely ignoring the premise of the question. You do get more zombies even if all of the other zombies are dead. When anyone dies for any reason they become a zombie, they don't have to be bit, they don't have to have ever even seen a zombie, they turn. It doesn't matter if it is NYC or some small town of 10 people in the middle of Alaska, they die and they turn.

Burning bodies will become commonplace. No corpse, no zombies.


And has been mentioned, people are pretty bad at killing without tools.

Yes. Yes they are. Why you assume a Dead Person is going to be any better without tools than an intelligent person with tools then we're done. We're done because you're going to keep making excuses and ad hoc rationalizations to make this work no matter any kind of evidence that's floated before you.


And according to the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/interactives/guns/ownership.html) only about 32% of households own guns (the per-capita rate for the US is much higher but skewed by the fact that most gun owners own many guns). Meaning most people have no good way of defending themselves from zombies at range.

1. 32% of people out of 201,881 people polled. Going state by state where it ranges as high as 50% there are places that will most certainly not only have enough guns for themselves but for others.
2. That is just the U.S. In places like Europe where mandatory enrollment in the military is required gun ownership and proficiency isn't taken into account. Let alone elsewhere.
3. Guns are not the only way (or even the best way) of taking care of a zombie.
4. This poll assumes legal gun ownership. Certainly more guns in circulation by state in the States that reported lower than 30%. Especially California. Gangs have households too.
5. This poll is also 14 years out of date.
6. This poll also did not even try to achieve an equal spread. Out of 210,887 people only say...477 people in Hawaii was polled. Hardly a deep spread of the State. The population of Hawaii is 1.4 million as of 2014. You can start to see where this is going.

That poll really tells us nothing. Especially as estimates in the U.S are that there are over 270 million firearms in the country (I've seen as high as 400 million). That is almost one gun for every single living citizen in the country to have a firearm. Especially if we go with the higher number, considering the 270 million is conservative. This makes the U.S the most armed civilian populace in the world. The chance for a zombie encountering someone with a gun even gets -worse- when you move out of the cities as Rural Populations generally report larger numbers of firearms.




Fighting off a person with a baseball bat or golf club might be pretty easy, but that is because they feel pain, a zombie that doesn't feel pain isn't going to care that you hit him in the arm or leg. And having trained a lot of people to fight in the SCA, I can tell you most people don't have very good aim with hand-held weapons and the mechanics to swing at the head take a while to develop well. I can also tell you that most people get tired of swinging pretty quickly and need a lot of rest after just short amounts of fighting. Those are all limitations the zombies don't have, they have no fear, they feel no pain, they don't get tired, and their "target zone" is orders of magnitude larger than the person fighting them has.

They also don't dodge or try to move out of the way. Or repair damage. Or work together in well organized groups. Or can outrun cars. A few swings of the bat may not kill the monster but we're not talking fresh people with vim and vigor. We're talking about corpses with broken bones that will never get fixed. Not feeling pain isn't a super power. There are people alive today who don't feel pain and it is a massive massive detriment for their health. Multiply that by a thousand because unlike these very real and very living people the Zombie lacks any form of self preservation either and that's another "Dead End" for a species. Pain is a good thing for things. It tells you when to back off and run away. It tells you when to stop doing something. Zombies lack any form of any of that.


Considering how many people have trouble even running a 5k, I would actually say our lazy lifestyle (and lack of survival and outdoor skills) would put a huge amount of the population very much at risk.

Yeah, sadly our love of TV is going to be our singular undoing. Knew we all should have done some marathons.


I think you would have a pretty high survival rate, but I also think you would have a high enough causality rate to cause many places to fall into chaos. The zombies wouldn't win but the chaos they caused and the time required to get things under control and back to anything even approaching normalcy would be a long time.

The "Chaos" they would cause would somehow have to break down society to a point that a bunch of armed troops telling them to shut up and get into their houses while the streets are cleaned by Blackhawk helicopters before it became a problem. At least in the Industrialized world. Which is what you've been arguing for. Places like The Congo? Probably going to have some problems. But no one is arguing that those places would walk away fine so it's a moot point.

[TheThan]

A Zombie outbreak wouldn't destroy much of the infrastructure. It's one of those things I don't get in zombie moves. Flaming cars on the side of the road, water and power lines being down and the like. It assumes a level of devastation well beyond the means of most zombies. Unless the government starts to bomb the crap out of random civilian centers life wouldn't even feel the speed bum.

I could see it happening if a population panics and starts rioting and looting for supplies. It’s amazing how few people it takes to cause a lot amount of destruction. But in order for that situation to happen, the system has to break down in an apocalyptic way. As you said, it’s a speedbump unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

i could also see it happening if these zombies are somehow unstoppable. They infect others at an alarming rate and the authorities aren't able to contain the spread for whatever in universe reason. in which case, you end up with the same scenario, panic, rioting and looting.

[Razade]

I could see it happening if a population panics and starts rioting and looting for supplies. It’s amazing how few people it takes to cause a lot amount of destruction. But in order for that situation to happen, the system has to break down in an apocalyptic way. As you said, it’s a speedbump unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

i could also see it happening if these zombies are somehow unstoppable. They infect others at an alarming rate and the authorities aren't able to contain the spread for whatever in universe reason. in which case, you end up with the same scenario, panic, rioting and looting.

A rabble isn't going to topple a water cleaning station or a sewage processing plant. You'll probably lose some power in places. Maybe water gets shut off to stop hydrants from going berserk. You're going to get fires but that's a bad thing for the Zombies because as was so eagerly pointed out they can't feel pain. A single flaming zombie is going to set off a lot of those around him as they flail and flop around and with no inclination to put it out they'll burn to cinders. For any of this stuff to reach a real fever pitch of worry we have to assume the very worst in EVERY situation. People are to mindless to avoid getting attacked by random strangers who seem to be very bitey. Every government in the world will have to drag their feet in record setting red tape obstacles. Police and National Guard in the U.S (who have access to drones, tanks, riot gear, the works) are going to have to bumble their way around to a point they never seem to reach an infected are until it's to late and the average citizen is going to have to turn from the boring sack of TV consuming, ho-ho eating slobs they're assumed to be into Che. And that all has to collide with a zombie that never rots because Magic. Is super fast and super strong who grow claws and talons to slay and can bite through bone or have amazing accuracy for going for vital spots like the throat every single time. So far the OP merely specifies that the zombies are fast (faster than a normal person) and they animate from corpses after a little while. And apparently don't rot. Everything else applies unless someone wants to change things further. These are still weak dead bodies. Not ideal for fighting your APEX predator for every meal.

[SiuiS]

Erloas touches on the reasonable doubt I've been working with. I also find the 'humans are bad at killing without tools' thing to be frankly ridiculous, given how very easy it is to accidentally kill someone in a fist fight or even shoving match. Anyone who has ever been in even just a three on one jump situation would know that doesn't matter if total casualties are small when you're that casualty. It's very easy to overwhelm someone with simple mass of meat, let alone several swinging levers in the mix.

Then again, how to kill someone without tools is a frequent thought exercise of mine, so. <__<



Yes, maybe I should have been more clear by saying “our current western society”. But I think that’s splitting hairs a little.


Indeed. If the question is 'how does our current society collapse at all' saying society as a concept continues is academic, and not pertinent.



Yeah but a pre-existing government should be able to take control of the situation before things get out of hand in a temporary collapse. The locals that got hit by the event usually don’t have to rebuild a society along with their homes. They just pick up the pieces and keep going.

If the ruling skeleton exists and the people are crushed, the skeleton doesn't matter. Does it get that far?



That’s what made Katrina so bad and such an embarrassment. The local and federal government knew it was coming days in advance, and didn’t do enough (or anything) to reduce the after effects of the hurricane and there were alot more people in serious trouble than there should have been after the city was destroyed.

The civilians were convinced they were savvy enough to handle it. They could weather it easy, and if not they could rebuild easy, and if not the authorities could handle it with little issue. It would just be a hiccup.

Sound familiar? Cockiness causes these issues. It doesn't solve them.



As for society collapsing because people want to survive -- I just don't see the "society collapsing" thing really being on the table. I mean, Europe was devastated in World War 2, whole cities burned down or flattened by bombs, armies rolling through slaughtering, and the response of the populace wasn't to run to the woods, dig burrows, and start shooting each other for a winter supply of "sapiens jerky."

Europe in the Great War didn't have a culture of people who believe that because morality is subjective they don't need to be good people, and there was no subculture of hooligans who specifically had plans to prey on their neighbors if a war broke out.

I can name specific people who I would shoot on sight specifically because I know they would shoot me for my supplies. This is the exact opposite of the Allies and their morals.


But there was. There were reports in New Mexico, there were reports in California. There were reports in Atlanta and New York. There were a ton of people who came to the U.S via plane who might have had the virus and the places that did went into lockdown. As for the zombies, you're going to have 1000 popping up in a much wider area. Not just airports over the country but morgues and graveyards and places like that. The spread will make it rather hard for them to be an issue.

It's already spread. It's all over the entire human population. All we need is for you to die for the effect to activate but you've already got it.



I'm not sure why you're expecting panics to the point of looting.


Doesn't need panic. I've seen raids on stores because of that guy on LSD that was called a zombie attack. We don't need panic. We need predators to have an excuse. This would be it.



Burning bodies will become commonplace. No corpse, no zombies.


Everyone says this, but I suspect they are simply ignoring the reasons it's not already common place for some cultures. Especially as a zombie scenario like this would be sufficient proof that supernatural forces exist.


A rabble isn't going to topple a water cleaning station or a sewage processing plant. You'll probably lose some power in places.

All it takes is one localized power station going dark, or similar, because of human error to shut down everything down the line temporarily.


Maybe water gets shut off to stop hydrants from going berserk. You're going to get fires but that's a bad thing for the Zombies because as was so eagerly pointed out they can't feel pain. A single flaming zombie is going to set off a lot of those around him as they flail and flop around and with no inclination to put it out they'll burn to cinders.

You of all should know how hard it is to burn a human body to the point of mechanical failure. Or to keep them burning.

[Razade]

Doesn't need panic. I've seen raids on stores because of that guy on LSD that was called a zombie attack. We don't need panic. We need predators to have an excuse. This would be it.

Do you mean the dude who was on bath salts? Because I didn't hear anything about raids on stores and can't really find any reports on google either. So you're going to have to provide some actual evidence for that claim.



Everyone says this, but I suspect they are simply ignoring the reasons it's not already common place for some cultures. Especially as a zombie scenario like this would be sufficient proof that supernatural forces exist.

I've been over this. If it's something that's actually happening in our universe it's not supernatural. It's natural. It also wouldn't be proof of the supernatural. It'd be proof is something is going on we don't understand. That doesn't make it magic. It just makes it an unknown. Any further and we're into religious talk and that's never good on these boards. But it would become commonplace. When people notice that recently dead people start rising but the ones that have been burned don't they'll notice a trend. That trend will become quite swiftly adopted because No Zombies > Zombies. Cremation is also a more popular form of burial than putting them in the ground in the U.S. Other cultures will merely have to adapt or have squads to come by every week to put hack the zombies into tiny tiny pieces. Their choice. Guess it'd help the job market.


All it takes is one localized power station going dark, or similar, because of human error to shut down everything down the line temporarily.

And...what? People go out and fix it. It would take all sorts of mechanical failures to happen all over the place to the point that the infustucture is strained beyond the point of saving. Might happen in the U.S with our crap roads and other infrastructure.


You of all should know how hard it is to burn a human body to the point of mechanical failure. Or to keep them burning.

I don't know what would make me an expert on the ability for bodies to burn but most dead bodies lack the water a living body has. Dead bodies are much easier to burn than living bodies. especially if they're old which you're claiming is the case for a lot of these. But there are other ways to make sure the zombies could be taken out without guns. Electricity and a pool of water for example. Zombies also can't put out flaming clothing or things like that.


Zombies are miserable enemies. I can't repeat this enough. It's like strapping a burger on a lion and telling you to kill it to eat the burger with your bare hands. For every meal. The lion is a better and stronger hunter than a typical human. Same goes for zombies. It's why you have had to grant them the lack of rotting and being fast. But even those two things don't even the odds. They don't know fear. They don't work together. They don't use tools. They can't operate machines. They don't bother with self care so even if they don't rot they're still going to be a target for predators and if they're dead they were decomposing at some point so the older zombies are going to have insects making homes inside of them. The fresher ones less so but it's still dead flesh. They're not immune to the elements and since they don't have any form of pain or preservation heat and cold are going to mess them up something fierce. Put a piece of steak outside in 100 degree weather and watch what happens. Combine that in places that go to freezing at night and then shoot up to the 90's with humidity every single day and the livability of your zombies shoots down to nil. There are just to many logistical issues with even the zombies you, SiuS, are proposing that you're not taking into account. Zombies are animals that don't make nests or keep warm. They don't know how to keep warm. Warm isn't a thing to them. They don't go for shade because they can't feel heat. They don't go for shelter when it starts to freeze because they can't feel freezing. Mind you, if you have something else in mind for your zombies that's something that needs to be clarified. The only assumptions I'm working off of is that these zombies are "fast" for zombies and don't rot. They don't need to rot for nature to take it's toll.

[SiuiS]

I've been over this.

No, you've been over your preferred, alternate scenario. This is not that scenario.

This scenario has magically no rotting zombies who suffer only superficial damage from the elements and do not experience rot – rot being a factor of microbial and vermin-based consumption. Because that's how they're portrayed. Yes it's absurd. Yes it's unrealistic. That's the point.

If you want to start an alternate thread about why this would never work, please, do. But please stop crapping on this one by insisting the basis of it can't possibly be.

I'm having difficulty conveying why this just gets me to roll my eyes and be irritated while staying polite. I'm sorry if I'm being too brusque but you aren't answering the question, you're questioning its validity. When a discussion starts with "consider this as valid" that's straight antagonistic.

[Forum Explorer]

Erloas touches on the reasonable doubt I've been working with. I also find the 'humans are bad at killing without tools' thing to be frankly ridiculous, given how very easy it is to accidentally kill someone in a fist fight or even shoving match. Anyone who has ever been in even just a three on one jump situation would know that doesn't matter if total casualties are small when you're that casualty. It's very easy to overwhelm someone with simple mass of meat, let alone several swinging levers in the mix.

Then again, how to kill someone without tools is a frequent thought exercise of mine, so. <__<


Eh, it goes both ways. Humans are really durable most of the time. We just have a few points of weakness that can be instant death with a bad fall. On the other hand humans can also fall from 10 000 feet up and fully heal from the experience.


But the real point about us being bad at killing things with our barefists is that when it comes to a fight, the person with the tool almost always wins. And it's the same thing with zombies. They don't have an advantage on us. They'll come at us unarmed, and we'll grab weapons and other tools to fight back. We'll fortify and they'll attack mindlessly. They do the same thing everytime and we change our tactics to the situation.


On how I think the zombies would do, well let's say they rose up tomorrow.

DAY 1: Zombies arise, and try and attack people. Some of the very old, unlucky, and sick are killed. Otherwise people simply run to the nearest vehicle, or building to fortify/flee. Police have great success in hunting down and destroying the threat. Military is put on alert.

DAY 2: Zombies are now all popsicles. Snow plows are repurposed to gather the zombies off the streets and roads. Some people are paid very very well to crush frozen zombie skulls and limbs. Or maybe we just use a car compactor. Some zombies are preserved to study for science.

DAY 3: We realize that all dead humans become zombies after they die. These zombies are isolated and rapidly destroyed though we lose some more unlucky souls.

DAY 14: Undead Prevention Act is passed mandating the immediate destruction of a corpse after it's death.

DAY 120: Canadian Military mobilizes to aid allied countries that don't have freezing weather to destroy the majority of their zombies.



What would make for a cool scenario though is the aftermath of a major disaster. Like the tsunami's in Japan, but now all the dead are shambling around as waterlogged zombies. With the infrastructure already damaged by the disaster, the zombies actually make for a pretty severe annoyance. Of course, not many zombies would be very intact after being hit by a Tsunami.


EDIT: In the case of being immune to cold damage, then most of the zombies would just fall prey to the ice. Slipping and falling mostly just hurts a human a little (though it can cause severe damage). Zombies are pretty clumsy and don't really get away from the ice. They'll be slipping and falling something like a hundred times a day. That'll wear them down really fast when they try and get anywhere. (In the end that would just slow down the timeline, but it'd more or less be the same)

[Razade]

No, you've been over your preferred, alternate scenario. This is not that scenario.

This scenario has magically no rotting zombies who suffer only superficial damage from the elements and do not experience rot – rot being a factor of microbial and vermin-based consumption. Because that's how they're portrayed. Yes it's absurd. Yes it's unrealistic. That's the point.

If you want to start an alternate thread about why this would never work, please, do. But please stop crapping on this one by insisting the basis of it can't possibly be.

I've granted that to you on numerous occasions (though the superficial damage from the elements is new). That changes next to nothing. I've dropped the rotting bit for a while now. Doesn't matter. Unless the "magic" fixes previously rotted flesh you've still got that as a problem for the older zombies. They're still average speed regular humans that can't use tools or use tactics. Not. A. Threat.

[SiuiS]

Eh, it goes both ways. Humans are really durable most of the time. We just have a few points of weakness that can be instant death with a bad fall. On the other hand humans can also fall from 10 000 feet up and fully heal from the experience.

Yeah, it's really weird.


But the real point about us being bad at killing things with our barefists is that when it comes to a fight, the person with the tool almost always wins. And it's the same thing with zombies. They don't have an advantage on us. They'll come at us unarmed, and we'll grab weapons and other tools to fight back. We'll fortify and they'll attack mindlessly. They do the same thing everytime and we change our tactics to the situation.

This though, not quite accurate.

See, tool use is a damn handy thing. Most tools you're talkin are force multipliers, levers, weights, fortifications. Against another human they're a huge advantage.

They still rely on trauma and shock. Anatomy and anatomical failure. And a fresh human. From experience, even something as simple as a light wooden chair leg takes it out of you to swing. Against a human, the smallest physical damage can send them reeling. Take what is essentially a well shaped golem of clay, put it in the attack position (arms up like they're going to claw or strangle you) and set it at a power walk. What do you do? Crack the head? How? Overhand 12>6 breaks the bridge of the nose, you lose leverage because it's grabbed you. Diagonal down? Hands and forearms soak your force by intercepting the lever system early on. Upward? You'll break elbows and ribs but not enough for the muscle to fail, because no pain, no reason not to keep the limb out there. Back up while doing it? Unless you know kenjutsu you're not getting the power to crack bone. And it's still closer than before. Run back, try again from a different angle? How long until you're in anaerobic exercise? How long can you pull out bone breaking force before your muscles give, you slow, you weaken? About thirty seconds, usually.

Crowbar? Worse. Axe or pick? Don't make me laugh. Sword? Machete? Unless you cleave with enough physical trauma to stop it you get one shot, then you have to pull metal out of bone and try again, while the bone bears down on you. Inexorably. That's crazy powerful.

Shoot them? Sure. That works. But how many people can actually do that first time they get too close to one? How many go down thinking actual cranial trauma is really easy?

It's not impossible. But the assumption that anyone could do it will get people killed. That's why they're always shown as prolific. Because they're a laughable threat. Their weapon is human arrogance. :smalltongue:



On how I think the zombies would do, well let's say they rose up tomorrow.

DAY 1: Zombies arise, and try and attack people. Some of the very old, unlucky, and sick are killed. Otherwise people simply run to the nearest vehicle, or building to fortify/flee. Police have great success in hunting down and destroying the threat. Military is put on alert.

DAY 2: Zombies are now all popsicles. Snow plows are repurposed to gather the zombies off the streets and roads. Some people are paid very very well to crush frozen zombie skulls and limbs. Or maybe we just use a car compactor. Some zombies are preserved to study for science.

DAY 3: We realize that all dead humans become zombies after they die. These zombies are isolated and rapidly destroyed though we lose some more unlucky souls.

DAY 14: Undead Prevention Act is passed mandating the immediate destruction of a corpse after it's death.

DAY 120: Canadian Military mobilizes to aid allied countries that don't have freezing weather to destroy the majority of their zombies.

Score. That's really useful. Means I can have canada be the stabilizing force in North America.



What would make for a cool scenario though is the aftermath of a major disaster. Like the tsunami's in Japan, but now all the dead are shambling around as waterlogged zombies. With the infrastructure already damaged by the disaster, the zombies actually make for a pretty severe annoyance. Of course, not many zombies would be very intact after being hit by a Tsunami.


EDIT: In the case of being immune to cold damage, then most of the zombies would just fall prey to the ice. Slipping and falling mostly just hurts a human a little (though it can cause severe damage). Zombies are pretty clumsy and don't really get away from the ice. They'll be slipping and falling something like a hundred times a day. That'll wear them down really fast when they try and get anywhere. (In the end that would just slow down the timeline, but it'd more or less be the same)

For the purposes of my personal project, but not this thread's scenario, I'm using A) the Ebola outbreak was much worse, though localized, and B) the Ebola outbreak covered up a lot of the initial rising, because people thought hoax and exaggeration.


My players, however, happened to be playing self inserts, and have an honest to god binder detailing their preparedness plan. So instead of hearing the news reports that would build tension, they fled by boat and are only returning to civilization after the initial damage. It's made detailing how things would have gone much harder.

The evil radiation is also slowly building; the zombie infection is powered by entropy and ill will. Eventually, cremated remains will pull themselves together, and corpses will spontaneously congeal out of dust. Imagine like, George Washington crawling out of the ground, man. Crazy.

That's the third act though. Act one is "things go south", act two is "humans handle it easy despite some ass-hats ruining everything by being immoral jerks", and act three is "zombies are spontaneously generating and have magical fire for souls, what the hell man?!".

[Forum Explorer]

This though, not quite accurate.

See, tool use is a damn handy thing. Most tools you're talkin are force multipliers, levers, weights, fortifications. Against another human they're a huge advantage.

They still rely on trauma and shock. Anatomy and anatomical failure. And a fresh human. From experience, even something as simple as a light wooden chair leg takes it out of you to swing. Against a human, the smallest physical damage can send them reeling. Take what is essentially a well shaped golem of clay, put it in the attack position (arms up like they're going to claw or strangle you) and set it at a power walk. What do you do? Crack the head? How? Overhand 12>6 breaks the bridge of the nose, you lose leverage because it's grabbed you. Diagonal down? Hands and forearms soak your force by intercepting the lever system early on. Upward? You'll break elbows and ribs but not enough for the muscle to fail, because no pain, no reason not to keep the limb out there. Back up while doing it? Unless you know kenjutsu you're not getting the power to crack bone. And it's still closer than before. Run back, try again from a different angle? How long until you're in anaerobic exercise? How long can you pull out bone breaking force before your muscles give, you slow, you weaken? About thirty seconds, usually.

Crowbar? Worse. Axe or pick? Don't make me laugh. Sword? Machete? Unless you cleave with enough physical trauma to stop it you get one shot, then you have to pull metal out of bone and try again, while the bone bears down on you. Inexorably. That's crazy powerful.

Shoot them? Sure. That works. But how many people can actually do that first time they get too close to one? How many go down thinking actual cranial trauma is really easy?

It's not impossible. But the assumption that anyone could do it will get people killed. That's why they're always shown as prolific. Because they're a laughable threat. Their weapon is human arrogance. :smalltongue:



Score. That's really useful. Means I can have canada be the stabilizing force in North America.




Zombies aren't really clay golems though, or if they are, you might as well have them literally be clay golems (and at which point you might as well have an invasion by the animate trees which is much much scarier then zombies)

You tear the right (or rather wrong) muscles, and a limb is basically useless. Generally pain is what prevents us from doing that, or we injure ourselves and pain tells us to not move so it doesn't get worse. If they do keep moving, well you do alot of damage to yourself. Thankfully we heal. Zombies don't. I'm sure you've had those days where you've been on your feet the entire day and they just ache like crazy. Multiply that by 10 and you get what zombies are doing to their feet. Without the ability to heal, I'd predict that zombies would cripple themselves within a week.

Then it comes to conflict, even light blows will add up, damaging and destroying muscles really quickly. Full on wrestling or punching or just any sort of fighting leaves most people aching and sore, win or lose. And that's assuming you are just straight up fighting the zombies.

How would I fight them? Well if I had a golf club, crowbar, or axe (all pretty common things to be in a garage). My first blow wouldn't be to the head, arms, or torso, but to the legs. I'd aim for their kneecap and side of the leg. A good blow could break or pop out the knee cap. Even an average blow would likely knock it over, (it certainly would to a human) and once it goes down I can go nuts on it's face, head and neck. There's no real reason to try and one shot a zombie. Playing it safe and going for a crippling blow is much more effective.

In a scenario where a 'reach' weapon isn't available, then I would armor one hand (wrap it multiple layers of cloth, with some sort of barbed wire and/or sheet metal as a layer. In my other hand I would have my weapon (knife, hammer or hatchet). I would charge, stuff my armor hand into their mouth, knock them over, and then either saw/chop off the head, or shatter the skull with the hammer. To protect my body I'd just wear a shirt under a sweatshirt, under a thick winter jacket. I'd be uncomfortable warm (particularly since I'd put on my neck warmer as well) but it'd provide some really good protection from the zombie's hands tearing me, and I'd just endure whatever else it tried til I finished it off.

But that's me being reckless and going 1v1 against a zombie. It's much safer to simply have a partner back you up. One person with some sort of pole braces it and impales/pushes the zombie away. The other attacks-crushing and crippling the zombie before finishing it off.

Of course that's again needlessly reckless. Instead I'd just use the most common lethal weapon in the world. The automobile. I see a zombie? I get in my car, and back up a little bit. I accelerate and smash into it, knocking it to the ground. Then I run it over a few times. Once it ceases to get up, I get out of the car and finish the thing off.

In case of a home invasion, well then it's sit on my roof. If they get on my roof, push them off the roof with a pole of some sort (a shovel or broom would do). Rinse and repeat til they are cripple, finish off.


Zombies just aren't a threat. Humans rule this world, but it's not because we are particularly physically fit. Almost every other Apex predator has us beat on that level, as do quite a few prey species. We rule this world because we are smart. Our intelligence has given us the tools and tactics that animals haven't been able to match. Taking that away? Gives you a foe less threatening then a cow. That's right. Cows are more threatening then zombies. Give me a baseball bat, and I'll fight a zombie without hesitation. Give me a baseball bat, and there isn't a chance I'm fighting a cow.

I'll go as far as to say this. Put 12 billion zombies in the USA all at once and all tomorrow. Every human they kill becomes a zombie. And within a decade the zombies will all be exterminated. Within a year the threat is well in hand. It will be scary and devastating, but all in all it will do less damage then Germany took in WW2.

[SiuiS]

Automobiles can't really stand up to that many collisions. I'm sure you've seen what happens when you hit a deer? But then, that's not the point.

Aching feet adding up seems to go the same way as microscopic physical damage from heat and cold, wind erosion, animals and vermin; any sort of 'it'll eventually wear down' doesn't happen. They don't wear down. You've seen the zombie with no meat from elbow to wrist that can still move it's fingers, the one with no guts, stripped down to the spine, and they're both still moving? I won't say it goes that far, but expecting time and entropy to help is still deferring to physics. Because the symbol isn't just a full on human shell that's noble; it's "behaves as in media/movies". They get ugly, they look gross, they're still fully functional years down the road.

We are still talking about "whether zombies" though. Are zombies a threat is obfuscation. I don't believe I ever asked if this would be the end of mankind. I asked how mankind would change and react and suffer before finding equilibrium. Explaining the zombies is, perforce, going to be an exercise in giving you enough information to make you stop poking at the how of zombies and instead address the how of people's interactions in such a crisis.

It's been long enough, let's see what we can distill down.


*


• For unexplained and entirely unscientific reasons, corpses animate. Any existing body of suitable freshness gets up and begins attempting to kill any human it sees, followed by any animal it sees. Humans get priority.

• These zombies are utterly immune to entropy as we know it. They don't rot. They don't weaken. They don't tire. They don't suffer the microfractures and tissue damage of privation, predation, environmental hazards or background chemical or radiological processes.

• They operate entirely on surface patterns, heuristics; a bullet to the head will kill them despite not destroying nearly as much brain tissue as would be needed to kill a human. Concussive trauma that would scramble a human's brain likewise doesn't hurt the zombie if it's not from out and out head trauma that hits the brain.

• Everyone who does becomes a zombie. Anyone bitten or possibly pierced by goopy nails of a zombie sickens and does rapidly, and becomes a zombie much quicker.


That's the plot device. The thing that's just congruent enough to go "okay, this is how most people would react" to. The fallout, as vaguely agreed on, seems to be thus;
• short term human fear, panic and survival stuff causes mayhem.

• humans use the uprising as an excuse to give in to their animal nature.

• Authorities are caught up between effectiveness and order, in the short term.

• small problems snowball; a downed power line won't be fixed because the worker won't go out there because there's no one to protect his family because police aren't doing good enough because... Etc.

• those who do survive the initial panic are almost guaranteed to be professionals in a military, paramilitary or highly regimented section of society. This means reconfiguring society goes smoothly – more smoothly than if no one was killed at all.

• within a short order of time (one to three months) some powers have everything locked down pat. Others need help from these powers, and it's given if only to prevent stuff from happening behind the scenes and snowballing again.


*


Everyone seems to agree with this, yes? So let's look at that one to three month point in detail. Stuff like;

On how I think the zombies would do, well let's say they rose up tomorrow.

DAY 1: Zombies arise, and try and attack people. Some of the very old, unlucky, and sick are killed. Otherwise people simply run to the nearest vehicle, or building to fortify/flee. Police have great success in hunting down and destroying the threat. Military is put on alert.

How does this go? Does everyone just get on the freeway? Doesn't this result in gridlock? How does the gridlock handle being swarmed by zombies? How do people fortify their buildings during an attack rather than before it? Where do the materials come from? Is society doesn't collapse, will they be held accountable for damages? How are the police so successful? Aren't they stuck in the same gridlock? Don't they have to weave between cars runnig down people, cars bumper to bumper? How do two man squads navigate together enough to become a paramilitary force? How does dispatch handle this? How does dispatch coordinate? Which areas of (your city) would they save and send officers to? How would officers react to being pulled out of tense situations to help someone else and leave their current situation to die?

DAY 2: Zombies are now all popsicles. Snow plows are repurposed to gather the zombies off the streets and roads. Some people are paid very very well to crush frozen zombie skulls and limbs. Or maybe we just use a car compactor. Some zombies are preserved to study for science.

How do these people get through the gridlock? How are they organized? Who organizes them? Do the police treat them as gangs of hooligans? Should they? How do the snow plows deploy? How do they navigate the traffic?

DAY 3: We realize that all dead humans become zombies after they die. These zombies are isolated and rapidly destroyed though we lose some more unlucky souls.

How are those unlucky souls lost? What isolates the zombies? How reliant is this on professionalism devoid of sentimentality? How does 72 hours of high stress and seemingly Biblical plague levels of badness affect decision making by these people? How many think they have it in hand and don't take every precaution?

These questions are not rhetorical. I am not being contrary to say you're wrong. I'm asking them because this is what I'm after! The interesting logistical bits, all the wheels and levers and pulleys of society that somehow operate together to pull through, and which give out, and what they compromise when they do. :smallsmile:

[SiuiS]

Not. A. Threat.

You keep saying (or intimating) that I'm shifting goal posts on you. I'm not; if you were to go back through and reread everything I've said that's been a correction or addendum, I think you would not find goal post shifting, but instead that I am saying the same thing in different ways, trying to find one that gets through. Less rhetorical manipulation and more just being very bad at communicating on my end.

The reason for that is simple psychology. I know exactly what I want. The people on meat space I've asked knew exactly what I wanted. A few others online knew exactly what I wanted. And you have not communicated to me, that you misunderstand what I want. This gives me the impression that you know what I'm trying to ask and are just nitpicking.

But I think you're in the same boat. I think the point you're trying to get at every time you bring up science or physics or possible/impossible or whatnot, is the same, that it's so obvious to you that it looks like I'm either stupid or just actively antagonizing you. And for that I apologize. We're arguing past each other.

I don't care if the zombies are a threat; they're a thinly veiled plot device. I care about how you believe your current home town, state, country and or local analogues would react to the threat of zombies. That's why I'm so blasé about whether science works that way – it truly doesn't matter f science works that way.


That's as clear as I can communicate my intent. Can you tell me yours? :smallsmile: What is the core principle you are trying to tell me by using all the surface patterns of that principle? And does me clarifying what I'm after help you at all to understand why I've been acting as I have?

[Razade]

You keep saying (or intimating) that I'm shifting goal posts on you. I'm not; if you were to go back through and reread everything I've said that's been a correction or addendum, I think you would not find goal post shifting, but instead that I am saying the same thing in different ways, trying to find one that gets through. Less rhetorical manipulation and more just being very bad at communicating on my end.

There's at least three things on the last post you put up that were not stated or I honestly didn't know you intended. Like the fact that it seems you've already got a time table of three months before society can right itself. So you're asking "three months after this scenario how would things go." Seems to me you've got it on lock if you've got it planned to that stage. I also don't know what "give in to their animal instincts" means because as I've pointed out this ignores the sum total of all human history. Humans do not go apepoop crazy in crisis. Except in your world.


The reason for that is simple psychology. I know exactly what I want. The people on meat space I've asked knew exactly what I wanted. A few others online knew exactly what I wanted. And you have not communicated to me, that you misunderstand what I want. This gives me the impression that you know what I'm trying to ask and are just nitpicking.

I know what you want to a point and I've pointed out why what you think are problems for us fleshy mortals aren't and keep getting "but they are." Why? Because it's what you want. And that's just not a very good reason for me to just throw up my hands and go "Well ok!". You're asking how it'd "really" go down but your point of conception has flaws so it's impossible to tell you how it'd really go down unless they're aligned to the rest of your narrative. Even if we're going to grant you that all modern science is somehow wrong when it comes to the special monsters you're working up there's just basic realities that can't be overcome. Even if you're granted they're magic. Even if you're granted that science just has noooo way to cope with this weirdness, the zombies are not strong enough or in a large enough group


But I think you're in the same boat. I think the point you're trying to get at every time you bring up science or physics or possible/impossible or whatnot, is the same, that it's so obvious to you that it looks like I'm either stupid or just actively antagonizing you. And for that I apologize. We're arguing past each other.

I do get what you're trying to convey (when you're not adding things on). I'm saying that if we're going to chuck out any form of realism or coherency then it's pointless to discuss how it'd "really" go because if you're going to make stuff up for the premise there's nothing really stopping you from making stuff up through out the whole thing. The answer "humans somehow figure out how to use this weird voodoo magic and take control of the zombies!" is just as valid a response as anything else.


I don't care if the zombies are a threat; they're a thinly veiled plot device. I care about how you believe your current home town, state, country and or local analogues would react to the threat of zombies. That's why I'm so blasé about whether science works that way – it truly doesn't matter f science works that way.

And I've told you how they'd react. I live in the 15th most populated city in the country that I live in and in the middle of a desert. The population of my city also have a lot of guns and a ton of police and at least two U.S military armories and a full compliment of the national guard since it's the capital of my state. The zombie threat isn't a threat. Between the police, the military and the general population have it handled. But that's not the answer you want to hear and you show your hand when you throw in the very blatant "humans give in to their animal instincts". Life would be mildly inconvenienced as the city is thrown under military law until the threat is contained and then life would go on. The zombies (your zombies) with all their bells and whistles aren't a threat enough to send the city I live in into any kind of spiral unless we start with the idea that humans behave in a manner they don't. And then we're back to make believe where my answer doesn't mean anything because we're just making things up based off nothing and my answer is "we become a city of necromancers" and be on my way.


That's as clear as I can communicate my intent. Can you tell me yours? :smallsmile: What is the core principle you are trying to tell me by using all the surface patterns of that principle? And does me clarifying what I'm after help you at all to understand why I've been acting as I have?

My intent was to answer your question until it became apparent that the answer I gave wasn't acceptable because it didn't meet the answer you actually wanted. Then it became to hammer out some modicum of coherence to give you an answer that did meet your pre-established crita and thus could fit what you were actually looking for. Now it's to leave it at my city becomes a grand necropolis shining in the desert built on the backs of a million dead who have fallen under sway of the dark master Necromancer Governor. And after this post it's to go write my own fanfiction where The Necromancer Governor fights crime with his or her spunky side kick Bloaty the Bile Filled Zombie.

[Forum Explorer]

Automobiles can't really stand up to that many collisions. I'm sure you've seen what happens when you hit a deer? But then, that's not the point.

Aching feet adding up seems to go the same way as microscopic physical damage from heat and cold, wind erosion, animals and vermin; any sort of 'it'll eventually wear down' doesn't happen. They don't wear down. You've seen the zombie with no meat from elbow to wrist that can still move it's fingers, the one with no guts, stripped down to the spine, and they're both still moving? I won't say it goes that far, but expecting time and entropy to help is still deferring to physics. Because the symbol isn't just a full on human shell that's noble; it's "behaves as in media/movies". They get ugly, they look gross, they're still fully functional years down the road.

We are still talking about "whether zombies" though. Are zombies a threat is obfuscation. I don't believe I ever asked if this would be the end of mankind. I asked how mankind would change and react and suffer before finding equilibrium. Explaining the zombies is, perforce, going to be an exercise in giving you enough information to make you stop poking at the how of zombies and instead address the how of people's interactions in such a crisis.

It's been long enough, let's see what we can distill down.


*


• For unexplained and entirely unscientific reasons, corpses animate. Any existing body of suitable freshness gets up and begins attempting to kill any human it sees, followed by any animal it sees. Humans get priority.

• These zombies are utterly immune to entropy as we know it. They don't rot. They don't weaken. They don't tire. They don't suffer the microfractures and tissue damage of privation, predation, environmental hazards or background chemical or radiological processes.

• They operate entirely on surface patterns, heuristics; a bullet to the head will kill them despite not destroying nearly as much brain tissue as would be needed to kill a human. Concussive trauma that would scramble a human's brain likewise doesn't hurt the zombie if it's not from out and out head trauma that hits the brain.

• Everyone who does becomes a zombie. Anyone bitten or possibly pierced by goopy nails of a zombie sickens and does rapidly, and becomes a zombie much quicker.


That's the plot device. The thing that's just congruent enough to go "okay, this is how most people would react" to. The fallout, as vaguely agreed on, seems to be thus;
• short term human fear, panic and survival stuff causes mayhem.

• humans use the uprising as an excuse to give in to their animal nature.

• Authorities are caught up between effectiveness and order, in the short term.

• small problems snowball; a downed power line won't be fixed because the worker won't go out there because there's no one to protect his family because police aren't doing good enough because... Etc.

• those who do survive the initial panic are almost guaranteed to be professionals in a military, paramilitary or highly regimented section of society. This means reconfiguring society goes smoothly – more smoothly than if no one was killed at all.

• within a short order of time (one to three months) some powers have everything locked down pat. Others need help from these powers, and it's given if only to prevent stuff from happening behind the scenes and snowballing again.


*


Everyone seems to agree with this, yes? So let's look at that one to three month point in detail. Stuff like;

On how I think the zombies would do, well let's say they rose up tomorrow.

DAY 1: Zombies arise, and try and attack people. Some of the very old, unlucky, and sick are killed. Otherwise people simply run to the nearest vehicle, or building to fortify/flee. Police have great success in hunting down and destroying the threat. Military is put on alert.

How does this go? Does everyone just get on the freeway? Doesn't this result in gridlock? How does the gridlock handle being swarmed by zombies? How do people fortify their buildings during an attack rather than before it? Where do the materials come from? Is society doesn't collapse, will they be held accountable for damages? How are the police so successful? Aren't they stuck in the same gridlock? Don't they have to weave between cars runnig down people, cars bumper to bumper? How do two man squads navigate together enough to become a paramilitary force? How does dispatch handle this? How does dispatch coordinate? Which areas of (your city) would they save and send officers to? How would officers react to being pulled out of tense situations to help someone else and leave their current situation to die?

DAY 2: Zombies are now all popsicles. Snow plows are repurposed to gather the zombies off the streets and roads. Some people are paid very very well to crush frozen zombie skulls and limbs. Or maybe we just use a car compactor. Some zombies are preserved to study for science.

How do these people get through the gridlock? How are they organized? Who organizes them? Do the police treat them as gangs of hooligans? Should they? How do the snow plows deploy? How do they navigate the traffic?

DAY 3: We realize that all dead humans become zombies after they die. These zombies are isolated and rapidly destroyed though we lose some more unlucky souls.

How are those unlucky souls lost? What isolates the zombies? How reliant is this on professionalism devoid of sentimentality? How does 72 hours of high stress and seemingly Biblical plague levels of badness affect decision making by these people? How many think they have it in hand and don't take every precaution?

These questions are not rhetorical. I am not being contrary to say you're wrong. I'm asking them because this is what I'm after! The interesting logistical bits, all the wheels and levers and pulleys of society that somehow operate together to pull through, and which give out, and what they compromise when they do. :smallsmile:

Sure, but in the scenario you presented humans already are outnumbering the zombies at a ratio greater then 100-1.

And once you remove the whole 'human body' part of the zombies, well you might as well remove the zombie part alltogether. An army of 10 000 clay golems in every city gives you much the same scenario but greater in threat and intensity.


1. Sure some mayhem. At worst though I wouldn't put it past the level of the London Riots.

2. That I disagree with. Oh, you'll get some humans who will go looting and the like (just like with the riots) but honestly I think you'll get the opposite response out of people. In face of an outside threat like zombies (or simply an invading army) I think people tend to band together and support each other rather then go all 'survival of the fittest'.

3. Sure

4. In the short term? Sure. But maintaining infrastructure will be a priority fast.

5. While I'd say military professionals and the like are basically guaranteed survival, I doubt the zombies are going to kill that many people. Even in a lack on entropy scenario, zombies still aren't that threatening.

6. Sure. I'd say 1-3 months is actually a pretty pessimistic assessment of how long it would actually take.



Naw, it's a factor of a few things.

1. First major factor is space. There is so much space in Canada. The nearest graveyard (and it has all of 10 plots in it.) is an hour's walk away. The biggest graveyard that I know of? It would take me something like 10 hours to get there by walking. Hospitals would be worse off, due to being in a more central location. But at the same time they are also close to police officers and some even have security inside the hospital itself.

2. Is numbers. Canada's population is actually really low, comparatively. Thus so is our rate of death (particularly when you take into account a healthy population and good medical technology plus access to said technology). Going by statistics, around 82 people died per day across the entire province. We have over 10 times that number of police officers in my city alone.

3. Communication. We're a wealthy first world nation. The majority of people have cell phones, internet and the like. We can detect, discuss, and warn each other instantly when the zombies are first spotted. The zombies are stuck with their hour + long journey. So nearly everyone has multiple hours to evacuate and protect themselves.

4. Cars. With everything so far away, there are a lot of vehicles. And while many collisions will stop a car, it can certainly handle one. And with the zombies so drastically outnumbered as is... well if even a dozen people get it into their heads to ram zombies, they might solve the problem in of themselves. Let alone what happens if a semi driver gets the idea.

So DAY 1 questions,

No, not everyone, not at first anyways. Just those people unlucky enough to personally encounter a zombie. Call it a thousand people and you are being super generous. Not enough to cause gridlock though. Eventually once things are confirmed to be zombies, everyone would be given the day off (or told to hunker down in their workplace, honestly the latter is more likely) and that might cause gridlock. By then though the police would already basically be fighting all of the zombies across the city. Fortification is basically locking the door, and putting something heavy in front of it. Like your fridge + dining tables and chairs. Don't need much cause in all likelyhood you won't see a zombie at all. There is literally 10+ police officers for every single zombie in the city. They can move in force to kill the zombies (which are also grouped up due to generally appearing in certain locations)


DAY 2

Honestly, I think I overthought DAY 2. I don't think any DAY 1 zombies would make it. It would basically be a repeat of DAY 1, except everyone would be told to stay home once more zombies appeared. Fortifications would stay up, and the police would handle things again. With zero casualties (and why would the police lose anyone?) the populace would calm down down quickly.


DAY 3

The unlucky souls are people who are in a bad place at a bad time. Like being crippled in a hospital when a bunch of people die and become zombies. By being an old person in a home, when someone dies and you are unable to escape. By getting in a car accident and injuring yourself, and killing a passenger, getting another zombie. No one healthy and aware of a zombie should be killed by them.


The reality is that 99.9% of the people in my city would never see a zombie in person. Sure the dead walking the Earth is scary and frightening, but without the immediate threat? It'd send people running for church and/or their family group. People would band together and hunker down in front of the TV to watch every moment of the news. A gunman going on a rampage around town would have a similar effect. Scary, but not going to cause the breakdown of society.

Personally? I'd expect to be back at work on Day 3 or 4. And to have worked on Day 1. So zombies might net me an extra long weekend. Nothing more.

[Killer Angel]

How would I fight them? Well if I had a golf club, crowbar, or axe (all pretty common things to be in a garage). My first blow wouldn't be to the head, arms, or torso, but to the legs. I'd aim for their kneecap and side of the leg. A good blow could break or pop out the knee cap. Even an average blow would likely knock it over, (it certainly would to a human) and once it goes down I can go nuts on it's face, head and neck. There's no real reason to try and one shot a zombie. Playing it safe and going for a crippling blow is much more effective.

to "play it safe" with a golf club, means you must go in close combat. If you break a knee to a human, he will immediately fall, screaming for the pain. The zombie, more likely, will collapse upon you, starting a grab / scratching / chew routine.

zombies are not a threat to humans (as organized group), but 1Vs1, a zombie Vs a single human (even if with a sort of improvised hand weapon) in close combat? that's not exactly a one-way fight...

[Chen]

4. Cars. With everything so far away, there are a lot of vehicles. And while many collisions will stop a car, it can certainly handle one. And with the zombies so drastically outnumbered as is... well if even a dozen people get it into their heads to ram zombies, they might solve the problem in of themselves. Let alone what happens if a semi driver gets the idea.

Just a note here. Yes, cars aren't great at handling high speed collisions. But you don't need very fast movement to knock over a person who is not trying to dodge out of the way. I'm pretty sure a normal car could deal with a fair number of zombies without getting wrecked, provided you don't drive into them at even moderate speed. The car has such huge mass compared to a person just bumping them lightly (relatively speaking) is probably enough to do significant damage to the zombie with very little damage to the car. People's knees are fragile. Without any reaction to pain it probably takes one or two bumps max to wreck a zombie's knees rendering it fairly immobile.

[Tyndmyr]

The question is, what would a generic country do? How would it try to contain this? What protocol is there? At what point would a real, honest to god country say "Welp, send in the hellfire missiles and pray, because if it doesn't work we're nuking everything west of (eg) Texas."?

Honestly, in the US, we have more guns than we have people, and literally everyone has seen zombie movies. So, this is going to get handled pretty easily.

[Forum Explorer]

to "play it safe" with a golf club, means you must go in close combat. If you break a knee to a human, he will immediately fall, screaming for the pain. The zombie, more likely, will collapse upon you, starting a grab / scratching / chew routine.

zombies are not a threat to humans (as organized group), but 1Vs1, a zombie Vs a single human (even if with a sort of improvised hand weapon) in close combat? that's not exactly a one-way fight...

I really doubt it. Because zombies are clumsy and stupid. And zombies can't control their fall. (Not better then a human anyways.) It should be trivial to hit a zombie in the knee and be moving away from where it is going to fall at the same time.

[Bulldog Psion]

Just a note here. Yes, cars aren't great at handling high speed collisions. But you don't need very fast movement to knock over a person who is not trying to dodge out of the way. I'm pretty sure a normal car could deal with a fair number of zombies without getting wrecked, provided you don't drive into them at even moderate speed. The car has such huge mass compared to a person just bumping them lightly (relatively speaking) is probably enough to do significant damage to the zombie with very little damage to the car. People's knees are fragile. Without any reaction to pain it probably takes one or two bumps max to wreck a zombie's knees rendering it fairly immobile.

Just driving into them slow and steady would tend to push them down. The sheer mass of the vehicle is going to make it inexorable. Then back up and go forward several times over them to shatter their limbs. Ugly, but effective.

[Killer Angel]

I really doubt it. Because zombies are clumsy and stupid. And zombies can't control their fall. (Not better then a human anyways.) It should be trivial to hit a zombie in the knee and be moving away from where it is going to fall at the same time.

The zombie moves toward its target (you). They may be stupid, but I insist that, if you are sufficiently near to it, to hit its knee with a club, you're also dangerously near to its hands.
In this particular scenario you can be safe (if i recall correctly, there's no contagion... you are zombified if you die, not because a z. scratches you), but with classic zombies, the last thing i would do, is to go in cc with them. The danger is too great, and you need to be unlucky just one time..

[Erloas]

While not having preservation instincts surely would hurt the zombies in the long run, we aren't looking at the long run, we're looking very short term. They don't have to "win" a fight to win, they simply have to hurt their opponent a bit and even if the opponent does kill them they will turn shortly after, and that is a win for zombiekind. Obviously a bite is quickly fatal, but in many cases a scratch could be too.

As for not feeling pain or fear being a negative to a zombie in a fight, you've obviously never followed any sort of real world fights. Have you ever heard the most dangerous opponent is one that has nothing to loose? Have you heard that someone high on drugs, who feels no pain and have no fear, can be incredibly hard to take down by even a hand full of highly trained officers? There are many cases of people in those situations completely ignoring being hit by taser, of fighting after being shot several times. It would sort of be like every single zombie you fight is like fighting off someone very drunk or high on meth.

A normal human can fight through a lot, even what will lead to being fatal. But a zombie; that isn't going to die to kidney failure, a collapsed lung or windpipe, isn't going to bleed out (internally or externally), is going to be significantly more dangerous. Especially when they don't have to inflict even a fraction of the damage to you in order to kill you.


As for guns, yes, we know the per-capita numbers gives just about everyone in the USA one. But living in a very gun heavy state (Wyoming), I can tell you most people that own one gun probably own way more guns then there are people living in the house.

And yes, the Washington Post article linked earlier is 15 years out of date, but do you really think it has changed that much in that time? How many non-gun owners do you know that have went out and bought one to have in the that time? How many of those people are going to have more than maybe 10-20 rounds (one box for many guns, and more than enough for normal self protection) stored away? How many are going to be any good at actually hitting anything with it? I might have a gun in the house for each of the kids in a per-capita sense (and I know my step-dad has one that would give one to my mom) but they aren't going to be any good with it. They might be able to hit a zombie fairly reliably at 10-15 feet but they aren't going to be hitting a head with anything but luck. And anything closer than that and you're in a very dangerous place.

Sure people will get much better with them, and with fighting, and running and hitting them with baseball bats, after a few weeks or months of practice but in the crucial first few days most people are going to be rather useless with those weapons.

I just started teaching my girlfriend how to fight in the SCA, so not that much different than what it would take to kill zombies with a hand weapon. She did on and off practice for about 2 hours, the next day she almost couldn't lift her arms and it hurt to put a shirt on. I've known from myself and many others, it is easy to fight until you can hardly lift your arms to swing or defend yourself. And that is fighting/practicing at lower levels of exertion than it would take to fight off someone that doesn't "die" to one decent hit. I also know you can hit someone really hard in the legs and it won't knock them over or come close to incapacitating them, it will at most give them a good bruise. Sure if you hit them just right in the knee it probably will, but I think most of that is pain rather than completely destroying said knee. I also know the vast majority of people don't have that sort of accuracy without a lot of training. Also a leg shot requires being close pretty close or extending in a way that leaves you very exposed.

[Gnomvid]

So DAY 1 questions,

No, not everyone, not at first anyways. Just those people unlucky enough to personally encounter a zombie. Call it a thousand people and you are being super generous. Not enough to cause gridlock though. Eventually once things are confirmed to be zombies, everyone would be given the day off (or told to hunker down in their workplace, honestly the latter is more likely) and that might cause gridlock. By then though the police would already basically be fighting all of the zombies across the city. Fortification is basically locking the door, and putting something heavy in front of it. Like your fridge + dining tables and chairs. Don't need much cause in all likelyhood you won't see a zombie at all. There is literally 10+ police officers for every single zombie in the city. They can move in force to kill the zombies (which are also grouped up due to generally appearing in certain locations)


DAY 2

Honestly, I think I overthought DAY 2. I don't think any DAY 1 zombies would make it. It would basically be a repeat of DAY 1, except everyone would be told to stay home once more zombies appeared. Fortifications would stay up, and the police would handle things again. With zero casualties (and why would the police lose anyone?) the populace would calm down down quickly.


DAY 3

The unlucky souls are people who are in a bad place at a bad time. Like being crippled in a hospital when a bunch of people die and become zombies. By being an old person in a home, when someone dies and you are unable to escape. By getting in a car accident and injuring yourself, and killing a passenger, getting another zombie. No one healthy and aware of a zombie should be killed by them.


The reality is that 99.9% of the people in my city would never see a zombie in person. Sure the dead walking the Earth is scary and frightening, but without the immediate threat? It'd send people running for church and/or their family group. People would band together and hunker down in front of the TV to watch every moment of the news. A gunman going on a rampage around town would have a similar effect. Scary, but not going to cause the breakdown of society.

Personally? I'd expect to be back at work on Day 3 or 4. And to have worked on Day 1. So zombies might net me an extra long weekend. Nothing more.

Sorry massive wall of text alert!

I would tend to agree here unless there's also a mass death event linked to the dead rising, the police in most countries would simply deal with the isolated zombies very quickly.

Day 1. Yes the initial responses for the first reported incident would be severe skepticism but as there's so many cameras out there (not just people with phones and go pro's and what not) but cameras covering stores, buildings, parks, roads and what have you whether they be legal or illegal they are still present though lots of them are not easily recognizable, thus it would not take very long for the police and local government when they are finally alerted to get confirmation of what's actually going on before the first PO's are even tasked to go have a look. Yes FB, Twitter and other social media sites are monitored but not to find out if there's a levy issue in New Orleans or a Zombie outbreak in Central Park especially as the accuracy of "News" of anything there is rather questionable but for more mundane things like catching benefit thieves and potential terrorists.
When the first PO's are dispatched they know the attacker's are not normal most likely the people are on drugs, goodness knows what drug it may be now that's causing this (lets ass u me there's been a higher then average death toll so there's more then a handful of zombies to deal with from the get go) mass hysteria but there's been zombie drugs in the past so why not. The police arrives on scene and start telling the attackers to calm down and get on the ground (the camera's in the police cars and some officers are also wearing them record what's going on).
If the police cannot stop the attackers before it goes out of hand reinforcements are on the way as clearly that burglary/domestic abuse what have you crimes some of the force is dealing with can wait as this is by far more serious so the dispatchers are working over time to re-deploy the forces and this would also be the time that the national/home guard or equivalent (depending on what nation it is) would be alerted as they have a shorter response time than the regular army, as well as martial law declared to keep the regular populace away from the streets, not that the army would need more then a few hours for the first rapid deployment teams to be assembled and a general mobilization of the available troops would be completed in a few days at most. (well in Sweden any way and a general mobilization would be completed within 2 weeks maybe a bit more these days now that we also have a "professional" army rather then conscription).

Day 2. If the Police, national guard, military rapid deployment and assorted civilians with more guns than sense has not already dealth with the immediate threat by the end of day 1, then there's a large chance that it will be quite impossible for Phoenix to rise from the ashes in the end as by then (ass u me-ing the mass deaths hasn't slowed yet) there would be more zombies then people to be able to fight them in a effective way, which means by the time for example potus decides to push the button to neutralize major zombie infestations (larger cities) (as this would be the only real choice open to government at this point unless these super zombies would not wonder out of the populated areas after the food supply/things to kill runs out) this decision would come after all possible evacuation has taken place. After this Day 3 or indeed day 894 may not matter much any more.

[Tyndmyr]

While not having preservation instincts surely would hurt the zombies in the long run, we aren't looking at the long run, we're looking very short term. They don't have to "win" a fight to win, they simply have to hurt their opponent a bit and even if the opponent does kill them they will turn shortly after, and that is a win for zombiekind. Obviously a bite is quickly fatal, but in many cases a scratch could be too.

Not really, it isn't. To get a growing population, zombies must win fights WITHOUT being destroyed. Otherwise, you have a constant number of zombies, which doesn't produce a significant threat. If patient zero bites one person and gets shot, well...now patient one is the only zombie, and has to bite someone else before getting shot or the infection ends there. And eventually, if it's 1 -> 1 -> 1, someone's gonna figure it out. Even if they've never heard of zombies before. And then, it ends. Can't possibly make it to apocalypse levels.

Nah, the zombies need to reach hoard status to become a serious threat. And to do that, they gotta bite people without being destroyed.


As for not feeling pain or fear being a negative to a zombie in a fight, you've obviously never followed any sort of real world fights. Have you ever heard the most dangerous opponent is one that has nothing to loose? Have you heard that someone high on drugs, who feels no pain and have no fear, can be incredibly hard to take down by even a hand full of highly trained officers? There are many cases of people in those situations completely ignoring being hit by taser, of fighting after being shot several times. It would sort of be like every single zombie you fight is like fighting off someone very drunk or high on meth.

Nah. Zombies are just humans. Dumb humans. With no ranged weapons, and not even very good melee weapons. A bog standard human has the advantage on a generic zombie, one on one.


As for guns, yes, we know the per-capita numbers gives just about everyone in the USA one. But living in a very gun heavy state (Wyoming), I can tell you most people that own one gun probably own way more guns then there are people living in the house.

We also mostly live in houses, which range from heavily zombie resistant, to basically zombie-proof bunkers. Teeth are a poor means for getting through doors and walls.


And yes, the Washington Post article linked earlier is 15 years out of date, but do you really think it has changed that much in that time? How many non-gun owners do you know that have went out and bought one to have in the that time? How many of those people are going to have more than maybe 10-20 rounds (one box for many guns, and more than enough for normal self protection) stored away? How many are going to be any good at actually hitting anything with it? I might have a gun in the house for each of the kids in a per-capita sense (and I know my step-dad has one that would give one to my mom) but they aren't going to be any good with it. They might be able to hit a zombie fairly reliably at 10-15 feet but they aren't going to be hitting a head with anything but luck. And anything closer than that and you're in a very dangerous place.

A LOT has changed in 15 years, and gun ownership has climbed a great deal. Ammunition manufacturing in the US is tracked. About 9.5 billion rounds are used in the US alone every year(2012 NSSF numbers). That's more rounds than there are people on earth. Ammunition shortages are not a real world issue here for zombies, they just make for more dramatic video games and movies.

And hell, you don't have to be rambo. You just have to take a zombie out with you. Anyone who say, sits on a roof and fires until out of ammo puts a HUGE dent in the zombie hoard. If *anyone* does that, then it means the zombies have to be even MORE successful at biting people without dying.

Oh, and zombies are slow. Yknow how long it takes to walk a long distance? Even if you're motivated and have a purpose and nothing is in your way, it can take a very long time to walk across a city. Zombies have to walk, they don't drive. Plus, they're gonna need to stop to bite people. Plus, rivers and things can block 'em. Roads can block 'em. None of these things are permanent, but they all result in delays. Car smashes into hoard of zombies? Well, that driver is probably screwed. But he probably smushed several zombies. And they're gonna stop to swarm him. That's how zombies are portrayed. So, a zombie swarm would actually spread very, very slowly even if they ARE good at biting people.

Since we tend to not just leave dead bodies lying around everywhere, they wouldn't start out everywhere, either.

Nah, zombies just aren't a big threat unless you somehow handwave 99% of the earth turning zombie basically all at once.

[SiuiS]

It occurs to me that if the relative threat of a zombie isn't actually important, I should stop talking about it. Heh.


Just a note here. Yes, cars aren't great at handling high speed collisions. But you don't need very fast movement to knock over a person who is not trying to dodge out of the way. I'm pretty sure a normal car could deal with a fair number of zombies without getting wrecked, provided you don't drive into them at even moderate speed. The car has such huge mass compared to a person just bumping them lightly (relatively speaking) is probably enough to do significant damage to the zombie with very little damage to the car. People's knees are fragile. Without any reaction to pain it probably takes one or two bumps max to wreck a zombie's knees rendering it fairly immobile.

That's interesting. Makes sense. Like a high calibur round disintegrating in water while a low caliber round continues because of the difference in application of force.

Pity everyone tries to run things down at high speed...


Honestly, in the US, we have more guns than we have people, and literally everyone has seen zombie movies. So, this is going to get handled pretty easily.

Existence of gun does not mean even distribution or proficiency of/with gun. Nor altruistic use of gun; a man with a gun might help you, or might rob you.


I really doubt it. Because zombies are clumsy and stupid. And zombies can't control their fall. (Not better then a human anyways.) It should be trivial to hit a zombie in the knee and be moving away from where it is going to fall at the same time.

A body in motion stays in motion. Removing a single pylon of support means it descends as it moves forward; gold club range, provided your aim is sufficient to tear the joint and not just shatter the carbon fiber tubing of the club, means the zombie is basically getting a free running power walking tackle. Odds of hitting your legs are high.

It requires specific martial or military training to be able to efficiently use a lever weapon and also move. You need a lot of force and force comes from being grounded.


Not really, it isn't. To get a growing population, zombies must win fights WITHOUT being destroyed. Otherwise, you have a constant number of zombies, which doesn't produce a significant threat.

Your math is too simplistic. You're losing members from one team as the other stays static, you're not accounting for time or deployment. He best you could say is the threat level would objectively remain the same even if subjectively become an issue, and that's even based on magnitude: that one guy down means more for a three person group than a thirty man enclave. Time is the biggest because the longer that variable the more leverage humans have overall.


If patient zero bites one person and gets shot, well...now patient one is the only zombie, and has to bite someone else before getting shot or the infection ends there. And eventually, if it's 1 -> 1 -> 1, someone's gonna figure it out. Even if they've never heard of zombies before. And then, it ends. Can't possibly make it to apocalypse levels.

There is no patient zero. Hell burps and every existing corpse animates at once. Ebery death results in animation from now on as well.

These three points in response to you are the point for me; doesn't matter if zombie threat is done by day seven; what matters is how humans react at the peer group level. For that we need to have more data.




The variables we have that are important are time, number of humans, and number of zombies. We have to establish them before we can say anything concrete; all arguments so far have been "one of these variables is sufficient to change the entire output". So let's assume time is sufficiently small to start with, and the human:zombie ratio is small enough, that in the immediate sense, humans are cut off; the streets are flooded with enough spread out and intact zombies that there is no united resistance yet.

How would individual family size groups react, feel and respond?

[veti]

How many dead people are there around?

Let's start with a couple of assumptions:
1. Average life expectancy is of the order of 70 years.
2. A body that's been dead for more than a year is too decayed to reanimate.

That implies the living will outnumber the undead by at least 70:1.

I can think of some other factors that will tilt that ratio much further in favour of the living. Quite a lot of people are cremated - presumably they're not going to rise anytime soon. Second, of the remainder, most tend to be buried underground in stout wooden coffins, which would be hard to escape even for someone at peak physical fitness; and for the huge majority of people, at the point they die, they're very far indeed from "peak physical fitness". In my experience, the chances are they've been bedridden with muscles atrophying for, very likely, several weeks. With vanishingly few exceptions, they're not going to be busting out of a well-constructed coffin and tunnelling upwards through two metres of dirt.

So really, the only threat - on day 1, at least - is going to come from bodies in mortuaries and funeral homes. How many of those are there likely to be?

Well, assuming the aforementioned "70 year" figure, and if the average body takes 2 weeks to get buried/cremated, the answer would be "about one per 1800 living people".

Let's say that in the surprise of their initial attack, each zombie succeeds (on average) in killing one victim by the end of day 1. That will double their numbers by the end of that day, to 1 per 900 living people. However, you can't kill that many people without other people noticing, so by now the word will be out and the next day's yield will be much thinner. People will start using smart tactics, and I'd imagine the zombies would start taking heavy casualties.

I think the panic and shock would last much longer, and have much more impact, than the actual zombie threat. That would be contained within a week, eliminated within a month, tops.

[Forum Explorer]

A body in motion stays in motion. Removing a single pylon of support means it descends as it moves forward; gold club range, provided your aim is sufficient to tear the joint and not just shatter the carbon fiber tubing of the club, means the zombie is basically getting a free running power walking tackle. Odds of hitting your legs are high.

It requires specific martial or military training to be able to efficiently use a lever weapon and also move. You need a lot of force and force comes from being grounded.



The variables we have that are important are time, number of humans, and number of zombies. We have to establish them before we can say anything concrete; all arguments so far have been "one of these variables is sufficient to change the entire output". So let's assume time is sufficiently small to start with, and the human:zombie ratio is small enough, that in the immediate sense, humans are cut off; the streets are flooded with enough spread out and intact zombies that there is no united resistance yet.

How would individual family size groups react, feel and respond?

Really? It seems really simple to me, and I've had little to no formal training. But it's like using a lance. You aim to be beside the enemy at point of impact, not directly in front of them. Which is a simple as shifting a step to the side right before you swing. Regardless, it's also what I called an unnecessarily risky tactic. I think it would work and well, but there's no reason to use it unless you absolutely must kill the zombie in front of you immediately.




Well go watch a zombie movie. Seriously. You are asking how people will respond when under attack by a horde of zombies. That's what nearly all zombie movies try to answer. Generally the answer is 'get to a place of perceived safety, fortify, then deal with the psychological stress of being under siege.'

A family unit would likely cope with the stress better, and handle everything else better then a group of strangers, but otherwise basically a zombie movie. Try Shawn of the Dead. It's a good one.

My own family unit? Well first step would be trying to coordinate with one another and find where all of us were. Second would be to rescue those of us in danger. Third would be to flee the city. Fourth would be to reassess. If we felt we were safe, we would fortify our currently location, else we would gather what supplies we could and flee further.

And honestly that plan is more or less what would happen for riots, invasions, or natural disasters. Zombies is just a particular flavor of social unrest.

[SiuiS]

I think the panic and shock would last much longer, and have much more impact, than the actual zombie threat. That would be contained within a week, eliminated within a month, tops.

Aye. No one is disputing that. The results of the panic and horror are what I'm looking at.

Consider of those 180:1 numbers how many are children, elderly, infirm, compromised or surprised? Does that matter? Etc.


Really? It seems really simple to me, and I've had little to no formal training. But it's like using a lance. You aim to be beside the enemy at point of impact, not directly in front of them. Which is a simple as shifting a step to the side right before you swing. Regardless, it's also what I called an unnecessarily risky tactic. I think it would work and well, but there's no reason to use it unless you absolutely must kill the zombie in front of you immediately.


If you're right handed, moving to the right is the worst way to go! Youd step left and use your full body length to torque the thing around your midsection.

But get on a bicycle, stick a broom under your arm, go down hill at speed, and stab a snow-pillar. Make the pillar about six feet tall and maybe three feet in diameter. Tell me your experiences. I guarantee the nuance of lance work is much harder/different than the logical mental model. :)

Heck, do that anyway it's crazy fun! Just don't punch the thing. Especially not after it's thawed and melted again a few times :(



Well go watch a zombie movie. Seriously. You are asking how people will respond when under attack by a horde of zombies. That's what nearly all zombie movies try to answer.

I am interested in the fallout of a society which has seen so many zombie movies as to be over- prepared. Like I said, there are real life people itching to shoot other real live people and take their stuff, strictly because they assume it will be survival of the stronkest. And they'll thereby ensure that everyone is paranoid and dog-eat-dog by Preempting it.

Stuff like that is crazy powerful for shaping how this stuff goes down. Will the world go to hell? Yeah. Will it be because zombies exist or because despite police protests, people are shooting homeless folks in the head? Who's to say?


You are. You are to say. That's why I'm asking. :P

[Erloas]

Well according to data.worldbank.org the world average is just over 26% of people 0-14. The world average for 65+ is just under 8%.

That puts it at about 1/3 of the population mostly unable to defend themselves from zombies or power hungry survivors. Given there would be able bodied people in both ranges, but there are also ones between those ranges that wouldn't be able to defend themselves too.


As for fighting off zombies with a lance, those are even harder to be good with than most hand to hand weapons. It takes a huge amount of practice for someone to even be moderately good at it. Especially when you have to be good enough not just to hit center mass (where people train for) but to hit the head specifically, because just impaling the zombie doesn't kill it and pretty much only takes your weapon away.

A spear is an easier weapon to get decent with. Not many people have well built spears sitting around their house (I used to, but it was my brothers and he has his own place now). Sure most people will have shovels and brooms. I don't think a broom would hold up to much but a shovel would probably do pretty good. But I think most people would have a very hard time attaching a knife to the end in a way that would really last. The main issue with a spear is that it takes a lot more energy to wield effectively than most hand weapons.


For guns, this is from 2013 and it says the most accurate polls puts the rate at about 35% of homes have guns in them. (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/us/rate-of-gun-ownership-is-down-survey-shows.html?hp) It does show that various national polls puts the rate between about 35-50%. It says the North Eastern states have the lowest rate at about 22%. It also says urban areas have a household ownership rate of about 23% compared to 56% in rural areas.

What does this say to me? That areas with the highest population density is where we're going to see the most "natural" zombies day 1, is also going to be the areas with the least number of guns for easy and safe self protection. It also says those with guns in those areas will have relatively more power compared to their neighbors than in rural areas where everyone is on a more even playing field.

I'm going to say most rural areas survive pretty well. Less demand on limited resources, more community so less preying on others, and a lot less naturally occurring zombies.

I would also say you'll loose a lot of "first responders" in the first couple days.
Day 1 no one knows what is going on and a lot will happen before the first reports get spread. It might even take several days before it goes from "there are zombies" to "everyone that dies becomes a zombie, handle with care."
So the first day when someone dies of a heart attack, car crash, or the many other "normal" ways people do, people respond as they always do. When someone stops breathing first aid training says check airways and do CPR, if they start moving this is what the person doing it thinks they want, they aren't going to react negatively. They'll be very close to the new zombie's face, the end result is pretty obvious. This is how the zombies from the very old or very young or otherwise "feeble" zombies in the first wave get their kills. This also leads to a lot of stronger, more fit, zombies. It also takes out a decent portion of those whom would be enforcing and maintaining order when people start to panic.

The first day when a zombie comes from a hobo that died, if they wander out into the street and get hit by a car people run to the zombie to make sure they are ok, because again, no one knows zombies are a thing yet. In many roads, this could also very quickly lead to massive traffic jams and many car pile-ups. We already see this now, the zombies are just going to make it more common because they aren't going to be avoiding the roads. This will lead to more people killed in the crash, people gathering and responding to the accident, and likely a number of very mad people as well.

This will make it much harder for people to flee the city in the panic and will disrupt moving goods into the cities.

Zombies actually wouldn't be stopped too much by normal houses. What stops people from breaking windows is the chance of getting hurt, but more the noise and attention it draws to them (as anyone that would break a window doesn't want attention) so it wouldn't be hard for a zombie to break into a window. Even many doors aren't all that great and can be broken down if you aren't worried about hurting your legs or your shoulders. And drywall is pretty easy to go through, which wouldn't apply to houses as much (having plywood outer walls) but much more common in apartments and other dense housing situations. The statistics say about 60% of the USA population is in single family detached homes. So again, rural areas are safer. Suburbs are safer than the city centers but again, where you have the most people and most zombies and least good weapons to defend yourself, you also have the easiest things to get into. Most people living in apartments aren't going to have shovels, or the other common household tools that would make good impromptu zombie defense weapons. They are also much less likely to have a lot of spare food on hand because they don't have the room and food is always so close and easy to get in normal every day life.

[Chen]

Zombies actually wouldn't be stopped too much by normal houses. What stops people from breaking windows is the chance of getting hurt, but more the noise and attention it draws to them (as anyone that would break a window doesn't want attention) so it wouldn't be hard for a zombie to break into a window. Even many doors aren't all that great and can be broken down if you aren't worried about hurting your legs or your shoulders. And drywall is pretty easy to go through, which wouldn't apply to houses as much (having plywood outer walls) but much more common in apartments and other dense housing situations. The statistics say about 60% of the USA population is in single family detached homes. So again, rural areas are safer. Suburbs are safer than the city centers but again, where you have the most people and most zombies and least good weapons to defend yourself, you also have the easiest things to get into. Most people living in apartments aren't going to have shovels, or the other common household tools that would make good impromptu zombie defense weapons. They are also much less likely to have a lot of spare food on hand because they don't have the room and food is always so close and easy to get in normal every day life.

Zombies don't usually show that much intelligence when trying to break into places though. They definitely don't go kicking down doors. And I don't think I've seen em climbing in through broken windows either. So unless your window goes almost all the way to the floor I don't think there's a huge extra risk there. I'd assume most dwellings would probably be safe mainly for the fact that its far easier to go follow some noise outside thats easier to get to than try to get inside and get people. Unless they have some magic human detecting senses I suppose.

[Erloas]

Zombies don't usually show that much intelligence when trying to break into places though. They definitely don't go kicking down doors. And I don't think I've seen em climbing in through broken windows either. So unless your window goes almost all the way to the floor I don't think there's a huge extra risk there. I'd assume most dwellings would probably be safe mainly for the fact that its far easier to go follow some noise outside thats easier to get to than try to get inside and get people. Unless they have some magic human detecting senses I suppose.

If it does get to horde strength they just have to pile onto the door to break it, not so much specifically try to kick it down.

And they go through windows all the time in movies, they see people through the windows and head that way. How good they are at climbing does change a lot from one movie/show/game/book to the next, but I would think they wouldn't have much trouble getting into any window chest height or lower. In said fiction in many cases people barricade the windows up too, and that would happen after the problem gets more widespread but not nearly as much when it is first starting. A lot of apartments and homes have floor length glass doors to patios and back decks.

[Forum Explorer]

I am interested in the fallout of a society which has seen so many zombie movies as to be over- prepared. Like I said, there are real life people itching to shoot other real live people and take their stuff, strictly because they assume it will be survival of the stronkest. And they'll thereby ensure that everyone is paranoid and dog-eat-dog by Preempting it.

Stuff like that is crazy powerful for shaping how this stuff goes down. Will the world go to hell? Yeah. Will it be because zombies exist or because despite police protests, people are shooting homeless folks in the head? Who's to say?


You are. You are to say. That's why I'm asking. :P

Ah, I see.

Well I already told you what I think would happen in the scenario you proposed (dead arise from the graves, everyone who dies becomes a zombie). Without an actual pressing threat, I think people are more likely to band together, maybe go to a church and pray, then go on a rampage.

But lets kick it up a notch. For whatever reason let's say there are 10 zombies for every human. They just literally crawl out of the earth despite a lack of corpses (like you see in some video games where you play a necromancer)

In that case, I think people will actually start implementing their zombie survival plans. However, call me an optimist, but I don't think that's going to devolve into 'survival of the fittest' really quickly. Most zombie survival plans I've heard can be summed up as;

1. Gather Supplies

2. Get someplace safe

3. Fortify


1: Gather Supplies: This is the only step where I can see things getting ugly between humans. But even then I don't think it would be worse then say, a Black Friday sale. Which admittedly has killed people. However most of the chaos will be at grocery stores and other places where you get food. There will be some people who will try and play the system, gambling that the police and military will handle the zombies soon, and thus loot valuables instead. But I don't think anyone will target other people to steal their supplies of food before the military and police intervene and basically eliminate the zombie threat.

2. Get someplace safe: The only problem this will cause is traffic. Things will likely get gridlocked, fast. However, that isn't a guarantee. Many zombie survival plans, plan for this exact eventuality. That would likely mitigate the problem somewhat. Though people without zombie survival plans will likely still flee, so that'll be causing traffic problems in of themselves (and people are crappy drivers at the best of times. Zombies will not help that)

3. Fortify: They'll fortify and prepare to fight off zombies. Depending where Step 2 brought them, they might actually have to do this. I don't think anyone would attack normal humans who approach, but they might decline on letting them in.


Overall, I think the people's reaction would be less violent and dangerous then say the London Riots. People without a plan, would likely just fortify or flee. Their would be a third group, those people who plan on how to hunt zombies. They'd likely kill a lot of zombies, helping clean things up faster. There might be a few fringe cases where people equate zombies to open human hunting season, but I think they'd be a fringe case, and would get the same response as those people who declare open human hunting season in the absence of zombies (other then a slower response from police)

[Tyndmyr]

Existence of gun does not mean even distribution or proficiency of/with gun. Nor altruistic use of gun; a man with a gun might help you, or might rob you.

Well, zombies don't use guns, so, this is exclusive to team human. Yes, humans may not be perfectly nice to each other at all times. That doesn't help the zombies much.

And frankly, the whole "law and order vanishes" is oversold. Natural disasters happen on a fairly regular basis, and the usual way of things is destroyed. We mostly get those folks helped out, and get back to rebuilding. No roaming gangs of leather-clad cannibals or whatever other apocalyptic fantasy is realistic.


Your math is too simplistic. You're losing members from one team as the other stays static, you're not accounting for time or deployment. He best you could say is the threat level would objectively remain the same even if subjectively become an issue, and that's even based on magnitude: that one guy down means more for a three person group than a thirty man enclave. Time is the biggest because the longer that variable the more leverage humans have overall.

It means the threat doesn't grow before awareness of it grows. If a small group of zombies remains a small group for days, military or cops will eventually show up, and solve the problem. You don't get to apocalpyse unless you have a lot of zombies.


There is no patient zero. Hell burps and every existing corpse animates at once. Ebery death results in animation from now on as well.

Look around you. How many corpses do you see? That number is almost certainly zero, unless you have a very unusual life. That is how many zombies you will see.

You need WAY more zombies than that to pose a credible threat. Even one zombie usually does not pose a significant threat. You close a door and go the other way. Or just run away from the danger. If you don't have a weapon, run away is a pretty normal reaction. And it works pretty well against zombies. They're not especially clever, or especially fast predators.

Look, more fearsome predators exist. A lion or whatever is WAY faster than a human, and would totally beat even several unarmed humans hand to hand. Obviously MUCH more lethal than a zombie. But there isn't a lionpocalpyse. Hell, we're worried about making them extinct on ACCIDENT because we're so much better at killing, because tools rock.

Zombies would be an endangered species from day one.

A hoard of zombies, sure, you have a plausible threat, but one or two? Nah.

Let's go to FE's more interesting scenario:

But lets kick it up a notch. For whatever reason let's say there are 10 zombies for every human. They just literally crawl out of the earth despite a lack of corpses (like you see in some video games where you play a necromancer)

Then you have an actually fun scenario. If it's everywhere, you actually get significant deaths by surprise. At least, among those people that are outside at the time. Consider what proportion of your time is spent outside, far from buildings or vehicles, without weapons. In that situation, you're probably now zombie food. In any other situation, you get a more traditional hide/flee/bunker scenario.

In that scenario, I pack a lunch, grab a rifle, and climb to the rooftop for the best day ever.

[SiuiS]

Zombies don't usually show that much intelligence when trying to break into places though. They definitely don't go kicking down doors. And I don't think I've seen em climbing in through broken windows either. So unless your window goes almost all the way to the floor I don't think there's a huge extra risk there. I'd assume most dwellings would probably be safe mainly for the fact that its far easier to go follow some noise outside thats easier to get to than try to get inside and get people. Unless they have some magic human detecting senses I suppose.

Aye. A horde body could level cities, but you need some reason for them all to be there and applying force. This turns every survivor into Anne Frank, waiting for the right hour to hit the W.C., but otherwise means walls are probably a safety feature as long as it's not obvious you're on the other side.


If it does get to horde strength they just have to pile onto the door to break it, not so much specifically try to kick it down.

Depends on the door. Some can be taken down by three men power walking; some require police rams. And you'd be surprised where you find them; my appartment door is the sturdy metal "need an axe to escape in case of fire" kind. That's probably why they remodeled to have large glass patio doors.


And they go through windows all the time in movies, they see people through the windows and head that way. How good they are at climbing does change a lot from one movie/show/game/book to the next, but I would think they wouldn't have much trouble getting into any window chest height or lower. In said fiction in many cases people barricade the windows up too, and that would happen after the problem gets more widespread but not nearly as much when it is first starting. A lot of apartments and homes have floor length glass doors to patios and back decks.

Indeed. This is where newspaper comes in handy; patch up the window enough that it's not obvious you're on the other side. Getting through a window isn't that hard though; it's not even climbing so much as if the sill is low enough for the torso to get into by walking, they'll clear it. The body follows the head. It's just a a awkward crawl at that point.


Well, zombies don't use guns, so, this is exclusive to team human. Yes, humans may not be perfectly nice to each other at all times. That doesn't help the zombies much.

Doesn't matter. Team zombie is irrelevant; we only care about the trials team human faces. I'm not saying zombies would win, I'msaying your variables are variable enough that we should postulate likely outcomes before just saying "guns exist, so let's stop looking at this branch entirely".



And frankly, the whole "law and order vanishes" is oversold. Natural disasters happen on a fairly regular basis, and the usual way of things is destroyed. We mostly get those folks helped out, and get back to rebuilding. No roaming gangs of leather-clad cannibals or whatever other apocalyptic fantasy is realistic.


For every other disaster? Yes. That's the tragedy of it. And the beauty.

I'm sure you could find someone within two degrees of you that would gladly die heroically saving someone from a volcano or rebuild an entire city after an earthquake, who would immediately go "zombies! Worlds ending, time to go full frikken steam punk!".

90% of the problems in a zombie uprising are human caused, because they expect someone will cause these problems so why not benefit?



It means the threat doesn't grow before awareness of it grows. If a small group of zombies remains a small group for days, military or cops will eventually show up, and solve the problem. You don't get to apocalpyse unless you have a lot of zombies.


:smallconfused: the threat goes from zero to millions of corpses trying to murder you in the space of 23:59 to 00:00. The human reaction takes magnitudes longer.



Look around you. How many corpses do you see? That number is almost certainly zero, unless you have a very unusual life. That is how many zombies you will see.

An ambulance trundles into my apartment complex every month. Someone is late on their rent. Power company calls to say they aren't paying. Management goes to check. We've had three survivors of the fallen/can't get up variety, and several deaths.

I live on the water front. I live in a county where human trafficking and prostitution related fatalities are... Commonish, though swept under the rug. I live in a city where pizza delivery guys being a buddy to avoid gunpoint robbery, and where multiple robberies lead to attacks so the driver can't point out a guy later.

I work a register where over the last four years, twelve of the original eighty transient population remain. Ten moved away. Seven are in prison. Many are "missing", usually after turf wars with other transients. The highway and railways aren't city property so the cops don't check there.

Death is all around. We've designed the facade of society so we don't really see it, but it's there. It's why you have to go out of the residential areas to see homeless shelters, halfway houses, clinics, and hospices.

And the natural fallout of this? That all those deaths all get shunted to one place? That's not a good thing. It means you do start with a wandering horde.


You need WAY more zombies than that to pose a credible threat.

Who cares? Credibility is not an argument. You do not need to assume that your death will be inevitable, here. You need to assume (rightfully) that people will act to ensure their death isn't inevitable. That's all. The only thing you, the respondent, need to worry about are human psychology, group instinct, and tribal inclinations.

The only reason to worry about zombie details at all is if you believe that basic psychology won't come into it for some reason. And frankly, we're talking about the species that thinks antibiotics make asthma better, and that dipping medicine in water magically makes that water medicinal.

[Techmagss]

It depends what type of zombie you mean. Gonna guess it is Solanum which produces the 'classic' zombie. Slow moving, bites to infect, bullet in the brain to takedown, etc.

[veti]

Aye. No one is disputing that. The results of the panic and horror are what I'm looking at.

Consider of those 180:1 numbers how many are children, elderly, infirm, compromised or surprised?

1800:1, not 180. That's important.

To your question: watching someone you love die is just about the most horrible experience most people will ever live through. To watch, or hear at second hand, that their body had risen and needed to be violently destroyed... would evoke strong feelings in me. Specifically, I would be incandescent with rage.

If I thought I could find any more zombies, I'd pick up whatever weapons I could find, and go get them. Then I'd devote my time to trying to find out where they came from. I'd subscribe to every medical online resource and pore through their archives to figure out who was doing research that might have led to this. I'd make myself an expert on zombies. And if I thought I'd found the answer, I'd see the culprits brought to justice, even if I have to get myself elected president of the world to do it.

[SiuiS]

It depends what type of zombie you mean. Gonna guess it is Solanum which produces the 'classic' zombie. Slow moving, bites to infect, bullet in the brain to takedown, etc.

Magical absurd theoretical zombie: mostly identical to movie type but there is no infection. Wounds which would transmit an infection if there were one are swiftly lethal. Only actual assault to the head which causes puncture-style brain trauma will kill; knife to eye socket will work despite doing less damage that a perfectly placed haymaker or full auto to the torso through hydrostatic shock. Immune to natural wear and tear beyond cosmetic damage; sunlight, heat, cold, wind erosion, pests, cellular breakdown, heat death of the universe, a fail to affect zombies.

[Fable Wright]

While I haven't read the thread and don't know what kind of responses you've gotten so far, I've got two things that might be useful. First, the Pentagon's protocol of dealing with a zombie outbreak. (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2014/images/05/16/dod.zombie.apocalypse.plan.pdf) The second, my kneejerk reaction for how it would go.

Here's my kneejerk reaction for a progression of events:

1. Zombies are discovered. Word quickly spreads worldwide. If the threat is serious, martial law is enforced. Police officers are often found in riot gear. In the event zombies are found, a policy is in place that the Police are called, and the civilians instructed to go inside. If there's one zombie, a single officer will drive up, confirm that it is a zombie and only one, then shoots to kill. If it's more than one zombie, Police arrives in or calls in numbers, wait in their defensible cars if necessary, then form a riot barrier and shoot to kill the zombie masses.

2. It becomes clear that the dead are coming from somewhere, and it is soon discovered that graveyards are the source. Police across the world suit up in riot gear, storm graveyards, disinter every grave they can find, cremate the remains, shooting every zombie they can find in the process.

3. After 1-3 months, almost every known graveyard is ashes. A few zombies are still around, and as a result, police still shoot to kill, and it's culturally acceptable to carry around firearms in many more places in the world. Cremation becomes the only acceptable way to deal with the dead. Morgues and forensics departments are placed under heavier guard to ensure that any zombies rising there are put down before they can hurt the workers there. Scientists begin studying the zombie phenomenon in greater detail, greatly increasing the world's understanding of death. Life mostly carries on as we know it, except for the great tragedy of the deaths in the chaos of the first zombie surge.

[veti]

Magical absurd theoretical zombie: mostly identical to movie type but there is no infection. Wounds which would transmit an infection if there were one are swiftly lethal.

I've been wondering about this for a while: if these wounds are "lethal", and those who die of them immediately rise as zombies, then in what sense is that not "an infection"?

[SiuiS]

That's good.

What damage do you expect there to be in the first zombie surge?


I've been wondering about this for a while: if these wounds are "lethal", and those who die of them immediately rise as zombies, then in what sense is that not "an infection"?

It fits the hueristics, yes. A zombie infection is some transferable microbe or particle which causes the death and the transformation, which can be found, isolated, identified, and acted on.

I'm putting an arbitrary kibosh on that. We have enough resistance to the question, because enough people feel the question isn't worth answering, based solely on 'zombie threat don't real", and having people defer to the medical community and say "oh we study and cure it the end" is even less helpful.

Like, I could have a fever, sore joints, and feel bad, and say "I have a cold", but it doesn't mean I am actually infected by the virus which causes the cold in humans. It's a functional model even though it's not technically correct, but leads to confusion when the construction worker tries talking to the medical student who has an entirely different understanding of what infection means.

[Fable Wright]

That's good.

What damage do you expect there to be in the first zombie surge?

I'm seeing a lack of riot gear and manpower being a problem for the police. The first might be alleviated by the use of squad cars as mobile cover, but the second is going to cause huge problems in small old towns with little gun ownership and deep graveyards. There's going to be a surge of people heading to urban/suburban population centers, as those have the best equipped, are the most fortified, and have the least number of dead within their walls. (Relatively) poor people immigrating to population centers en mass has happened before, and there are any number of case studies to look into for the ramifications of that.

Very rural areas, like the American midwest or Alaska, have enough resources stockpiled, poor weather fortifications, and weaponry to fare rather well against the zombie attack, so I'm going to say that the long-reaching threats will not include a food crisis, at least after the roads become safer. I think it's going to be likely that the vast majority of property damage caused will either come from riots, though given the police presence the results of that are unclear, or cars hitting zombies on the road and assuming that, just like in the movies, you'll be able to keep driving just fine. Buildings are likely going to be just fine, as it takes a lot to tear one down with your bare hands. Sewage/pipes are likely to be suspect while people don't know the source of the infestation, but they'll emerge intact. Power lines might get damaged, but to a far lesser extent than happens in most natural disasters; zombies are unlikely to take interest in them, and they tend to be built to last. The bigger problem will be people accidentally running into them in their exodus to cities and the lack of maintenance crews when there are Zombies haunting the roads.

Zombies arriving in towns are also likely to cause a large amount of damage while they're about, but I can't estimate the impact thereof. If the zombies exhibit highly aberrant behavior, which seems likely, people are likely to stay away and call the police to report suspicious or aggressive individuals, which means that if the biting does start, it will be relatively contained. A couple hospitals and ambulances might suffer serious problems from the surprise of the zombie attacks, but that's likely to sort itself out in short order, given the restraints that will more often than not be holding the zombies down when they start moving again.

In all, a lot of people will be hungry for a while as the roads become safe again, factory towns will be shut down, urban centers will have a lack of living space, zombie attacks in urban centers might kill up to a couple hundred or, if riots become a serious issue (causing rioters-***-zombies to appear en mass), a couple thousand people state- or nation-wide, and a lot of people are going to be absolutely miserable for a while, but on the whole, the damage will be relatively survivable and I can't see recovery starting more than 6 months after the initial outbreak, probably closer to 3, and finishing no more than 2-3 years after it begins.

Then again, I've got no experience with this sort of thing, don't watch much of the news to compare this to other real life disasters, and people tell me I have too much faith in humanity and don't plan enough for human stupidity. Still, it's what I see happening.

[veti]

In my country, this is how I see it going down.

Day 1: A lot depends on when the attack first strikes.

Case 1: If it happens in the middle of a working day, I expect most people would remain at work - a known, safe place - until at least their normal knocking-off time. They might form groups to travel home together, and some people who walk or cycle to work might beg lifts from those with cars. People's first priority would be to meet up with their loved ones, which would be complicated by the fact that the cellphone networks would probably fail under the load of people trying to make calls. (Incidentally, so far this is pretty much the same as the localised effect of a terrorist attack or natural disaster, and we are actively encouraged to prepare for those - by having a plan to meet up, and sufficient stores of preserved food and bottled water about the house.)

Case 2: If it strikes in the middle of the night, then "meeting up with loved ones" isn't a problem - if you know about it. However, a good many people wouldn't be aware of anything having happened, so they'd get up and go to work as normal, and may not hear any news until they get there. This becomes like Case 1, except that the numbers of people affected are lower, so "getting in touch with loved ones" is likely to be easier (cellphones more likely to work).

Let's say that many deaths occur among the unlucky and unwary. Perhaps as many as one in 1000 people dies (and rises) in the initial onslaught. Individually, zombies are still outnumbered by living people at a ratio of several hundred to one. There's still at least two serving police officers per zombie.

Things I don't see happening:

Everyone fleeing the city. For one thing, cities aren't particularly dangerous. Yes, there are more dead people around there, but also more living people, therefore safety in numbers. For another thing, most people who live in the cities have nowhere to flee to. I, for one, don't have an isolated holiday cabin in the woods somewhere.
Large-scale looting. Didn't happen after 9/11 or the London bombings of 7/7, or during or after the Sydney siege or the Paris bombing or any other terrorist attack in recent memory. Didn't happen after the Christchurch earthquake or the Fukushima tsunami. Don't see why it would happen in this scenario.
Fortified enclaves. What would be the point? At most, I see some sort of enhanced "Neighbourhood Watch" programmes appearing, designed to make sure there are frequent checks on elderly, sick or vulnerable people.
Breakdown of law and order. People in fear for their lives will look to police and other authority figures for information and advice. They won't want to make enemies.


Day 2: Pretty much everyone stays home, glued to the TV. Some people might start trying to organise the "Neighbourhood Watch Plus" type schemes mentioned above. Worst case would be there's no power, but I suspect the Powers That Be would treat that as a high priority.

Day 3: By now, paranoia and hysteria will be starting to claim some victims. People will imagine they're ill and blame it on all kinds of things that might be related to the zombies: airborne viruses, bad water, contaminated food, you name it. A fair number of people (from eating out-of-date food, for instance, or just from sitting up all night and worrying too much) really get ill. Health services are in some degree of chaos. Hospitals are already in very high security mode (because of the likelihood of people dying there), and most doctors' practices are probably closed, so medical helplines will be under heavy load. Casualties will still be very low, as long as there's no actual contamination in the water. However, some very frail/sick people might die around this time, adding to the threat.

Day 4: People will be starting to get organised. Some shops and workplaces will start to reopen. The hysteria will be calmed somewhat.

By about day 7, I think we'd be back to approximately normal. It'd take a while longer for scientists to work out exactly how the thing that's not an infection is spread, exactly what is the safest, surest and cleanest way of killing a zombie, and for emergency teams to come up with new rules and protocols for how to handle critical patients and fresh corpses. But that's all - while interesting and scary and disgusting - not of much immediate concern to most people, who can get in with their lives at this point.

[comicshorse]

Just a thought but as news of this gets out and the images of the zombie apocalpyse's we have all seen in film percolate through people brains (not to mention the implications of the dead rising) I see suicide rates sky rocketing which will of course create more zombies

[Bulldog Psion]

Just a thought but as news of this gets out and the images of the zombie apocalpyse's we have all seen in film percolate through people brains (not to mention the implications of the dead rising) I see suicide rates sky rocketing which will of course create more zombies

Again, though, that would be a brief pulse rather than a massive ongoing phenomenon. The most susceptible would kill themselves almost immediately; then it would probably fall to almost the normal suicide rate (perhaps slightly elevated).

Some suicidal people might take steps to prevent turning into zombies, however, such as sitting in a car or small shed, setting it on fire, and then shooting themselves.

[SiuiS]

People moving away from cities, that's novel. Okay. I like it.


Just a thought but as news of this gets out and the images of the zombie apocalpyse's we have all seen in film percolate through people brains (not to mention the implications of the dead rising) I see suicide rates sky rocketing which will of course create more zombies

No, of course not. Remember, all humans are completely informed rational actors who are in no way susceptible to fear, assumption or poor decision making.




Some suicidal people might take steps to prevent turning into zombies, however, such as sitting in a car or small shed, setting it on fire, and then shooting themselves.

See? :smallwink:

[Bulldog Psion]

The reason this conversation is going around in circles and not getting anywhere like a tire in slushy mud is that it seems a certain conclusion is desired, and so the facts are supposed to be massaged to fit it. The assumptions that have already been decided to be true are:

1. The zombies are an overwhelming threat.

2. The government is a bureaucratic caricature that can't respond to an invasion for literally months, if ever.

3. Humans are just itching to destroy their own society, go berserk, cause everything to break down, shoot and eat each other, and then starve to death in the ruins.

4. Only a "perfectly rational" creature with "perfect information" would fail to act in the ways described above.

If we're talking "what would really go down," as the thread title states, and this is supposed to be what would happen in reality, then I can't see any of these four points actually corresponding to the situation. To wit:

1. Zombies, particularly as described, are a lousy threat. They're slow, they're stupid, they have no weapons, and if they're not spreading via a virus or zombie magic, they are spread out very, very thin rather than appearing in giant hordes. Humans are faster, far, far more intelligent, and far better armed, and outnumber them by a lot. And have technology (cremation, coffins, shovels, etc.) that will make zombie "reproduction" slow to a tiny trickle almost immediately, without changing anything very much, even.

Zombies just suck as a threat unless you add in some kind of magic supervillain powers; in which case, they can just be handwaved to the point of being overwhelming and the problem is solved. Just say "they can run 200 miles per hour, are immune to all human weapons, punch through reinforced concrete like wet cardboard, and win no matter what."

The problem here isn't that humans are being shown as too tough, it's that the threat is too weak. Amp up the threat, and the humans go down. For example, an invasion of 500 million earth elementals would probably finish humanity off quite rapidly. It's just that the zombies are bog-standard humans with a bunch of huge disadvantages tacked on.

2. Governments have organizations in place to deal with threats on a local and national level, that is, police and armies. They are equipped and trained to deal with riot and invasion. There is no reason they would not deal with the zombies, who are far less threatening than an enemy soldier with a rifle or even a rioter with a car and a baseball bat.

3. Humans made human society as a survival mechanism. You don't need rational thought or deep musing for them to want to keep it in existence. The animal fear of starving, freezing, dying of eminently curable diseases, and being picked off by predators is sufficient to cause them to band together and attempt to maintain their society, which is what is keeping them alive.

Humans attempt to rebuild their society inside concentration camps where they are starving to death and are all going to be exterminated in a few months, for gosh sakes -- they try to write secret diaries, attempt to give each other medical treatment, even in some cases try to put together plays or concerts for some glimpse of normality. And these are condemned people living in conditions of nightmarish horror.

It's totally contrary to human nature to assume that society is going to implode frantically and permanently because of a slight uptick in zombie street crime. It bears no resemblance to actual humans, at all. A few wackjobs may go off the deep end and create a minor disturbance here and there, but most people want to live, and that imperative will cause them to support the structure that is quite explicitly keeping them alive.

4. NONE of this requires "perfect rationality" or "perfect information." It just requires ordinary people who aren't suicidally stupid and who don't unrealistically fall to pieces and throw away 5000+ years of civilization in a bizarre pointless frenzy when a couple extra muggers are added to the city, even if the muggers are undead.

However, with that said:

If someone wants zombies to be superbeings of immense power who overawe the poor trembling humans, who in turn are all insane fools just looking for an excuse to kick over the societal arrangements that keep them alive and run around howling at the moon until they starve to death while chewing on each other's shins, then I hope they'll have a great time writing it up.

Someone looking for that story doesn't need me to tell them it's reasonable or what would actually happen, because I won't, but it does make a fun scenario for certain types of stories.

So, my thought is -- if a specific scenario is what is wanted, write the story the way it pleases the author, and don't worry about it being reasonable or realistic. Just enjoy the zombie-themed ride and have a good time! :smallsmile:

[Komatik]

Much of North America would probably end up a nuclear wasteland. So many fuel rods stored in pools instead of proper final containment.

[Fable Wright]

Much of North America would probably end up a nuclear wasteland. So many fuel rods stored in pools instead of proper final containment.

...This makes literally no sense whatsoever. First off, water is an excellent radiation buffer, keeping it from leaking into the environment at large, with few ill effects. Second, why would the introduction of zombies into the ecosystem cause depleted fuel rods with little to no widespread capabilities to suddenly change and enormous, widespread damage? Third, you are aware that, prior to and during human colonization of this planet, there were natural uranium-powered radiation hotsprings that had thriving ecosystems around them, yes? Irradiated pools of water do not cause irradiated wastelands by themselves. Fourth, if you're talking about reactors not getting properly maintained due to the zombie apocalypse, you are aware that there are many safety measures in place to cause a shutdown instead of a meltdown barring extreme circumstances, yes? Finally, you are aware that nuclear generators tend to be well-guarded, extremely defensible positions with a good power source that make excellent safe havens from zombie attacks, right?

In short, I do not see any situation in which North America ends up a nuclear wasteland, save the corner case in which North Korea tries to take advantage of the zombie distraction to launch ICBM nukes that reach NA soil, or the slightly less possible case in which infiltrators in the US chain of command take advantage of the panic caused by zombies, hijack the nuclear codes, and order America to nuke itself in spite of 'protect America against nuclear threats' being at the top of the Pentagon's list of priorities in their zombie outbreak plan.

[Killer Angel]

1. Zombies, particularly as described, are a lousy threat. They're slow, they're stupid, they have no weapons, and if they're not spreading via a virus or zombie magic, they are spread out very, very thin rather than appearing in giant hordes. Humans are faster, far, far more intelligent, and far better armed, and outnumber them by a lot. And have technology (cremation, coffins, shovels, etc.) that will make zombie "reproduction" slow to a tiny trickle almost immediately, without changing anything very much, even.

Zombies just suck as a threat unless you add in some kind of magic supervillain powers; in which case, they can just be handwaved to the point of being overwhelming and the problem is solved. Just say "they can run 200 miles per hour, are immune to all human weapons, punch through reinforced concrete like wet cardboard, and win no matter what."

The problem here isn't that humans are being shown as too tough, it's that the threat is too weak. Amp up the threat, and the humans go down. For example, an invasion of 500 million earth elementals would probably finish humanity off quite rapidly. It's just that the zombies are bog-standard humans with a bunch of huge disadvantages tacked on.

Pretty much. Classic zombies, to be a threat, need to suddenly (read as <one day) appear in massive numbers (read as at least 20% of total population), and spread all across the world /nation

[SiuiS]

Oh relax, Bulldog. I'm poking fun at you. Not because I want a desired "result" (to a scenario where the end result isn't important), but because there's a difference between some people acting intelligently, and everyone acts intelligently and with enough coordination that nothing could go wrong.

I'm fine with zombies not being a threat. I am not fine with 'I'm not going to answer the question in detail because they aren't a threat'. Why respond to say you're not gonna respond?

Other than that, I've asked different and more specific questions to get the information I want. Because I've been asking for information since conception. I've never cared about who would win. Only how and why, in specific. That's why I'm not saying "no zombies totally win bro" or anything. I'm not making an argument. I'm asking questions to see how well you've thought through your answers.

Because again, those answers as to how and why are what interest me.

[BannedInSchool]

Or another way of looking at it, if you glued orange beanies to 5% of the population's heads and told the other 95% that they needed to kill all the orange-beanied people ASAP, I wouldn't want to be one of the 5% even if I had a supply of glue and beanies to convert others.

[VincentTakeda]

Until the 'virus' is cured, the world will see over 120,000 new zombies each day simply from the fact that that's how many people die each day. When I think about a scenario like world war z or zombieland, where the zombie created rises less than 10 mintues from having died, and every zombie for the most part is a 'fast zombie' that can keep up with or outrun most people, and never tires...

I simply don't see it being contained. A headshot against a feral man at full tilt is not as easy as movies make it out to be. Law enforcement would take quite a while to adjust simply because their training is to shoot center mass. Retraining that instinct is harder than the training to shoot center mass in the first place.

One hobo dies in an alleyway and then kills a dozen of his hobo buddies and I'm fairly certain it'd be more than the cops could handle inside of an hour. Military guys abandoning their posts to go 'save their families'... The herd mentality of 95% of the people who witness an atrocity simply standing around screaming or even worse 'recording it for youtube'... Man.. It's like a buffet.

Car crash in a quiet little residential neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon when everyone is at work. Poor joseph finally had the big heart attack... rises as a zombie and wanders off to the high school parking lot nearby... Dinner bell... I mean school bell rings and 300 unarmed high school kids join him in a parking lot full of cars and boisterous hormones... The varsity team swiftly popping their trunks, breaking out the shovels and 'making quick work of poor Joseph' is usually what's NOT going to happen. People in general are not geared to swiftly and decisively react to surprise atrocities with focused, decisive action. People in general scream obscenities and run in random directions or stand there filming. Officer patrick is the first to arrive on scene... As he watches the hordes of teenagers running and screaming, the real threat comes into focus... Because he's the only one not running... He spots three zombie cheerleaders charging at him full bore... 19 miles an hour and smooth as a cruise missile... How many shots is he gonna get off before they reach him... it only gets worse... By the time swat has arrived, at least 4 zombies have spread out into the neighborhood, running down the slower, heavier, weaker, more tired school kids before they can make it to safety... Spread that trouble out a bit and it's all downhill from here. An enterprising young zombie with no more dinner prospects in burbank can stroll on over to las vegas in about 2 days without even hurrying. If these running zombies chill out and just walk at 2 miles per hour, they'll be all the way to maine in 28 days. Presuming the same thing didnt ALSO happen in maine. In that case the whole united states is saturated in about 14 days. Woe betide smaller countries with stricter gun laws.

As the 14-28 day clock is ticking, a state of emergency is declared, the president suggests everyone should stay calm and stay indoors. We will be coming for you. This is a lie (the government is decisively busy orchestrating the protection of their loved ones and protecting what will be the new world order) but it means little since rioters and looters are at the local walmart stealing every can of soup and box of ammo they can beat out of their fellow man. Every gas pump in the continent is bled dry since everyone knows the gas production infrastructrue is about to take a huge dump. If anybody dies amid this chaos... They've just created their own outbreak hotspot where none existed before... Good job humanity. Meanwhile small farming towns in nebraska have both plenty of early warning and plenty of crops and USUALLY plenty of ammo and only a few major roads leading right to their front door, so are relatively unscathed save a wandering horde or two...

Turns out the president wasnt lying after all. They will indeed be coming for you... But it's because they're zombies now. Zombie Pelosi and Zombie Tim Tebow have already made appearances in my campaings so far. New York City surprisingly fell the quickest... Despite having the most time to prepare, they failed to notice the difference between a fleeing screaming mob followed by a pack of gaunt expressionless moaners... Mistaking it for a 'Taylor Swift/Justin Bieber/Madonna farewell concert tour (another one?) until it was too late. Madonna was in fact one of the most successful zombies of the initial outbreak simply because when she became a zombie, nobody really noticed because her appearance didn't change in any meaningful way.

[veti]

Until the 'virus' is cured, the world will see over 120,000 new zombies each day simply from the fact that that's how many people die each day. When I think about a scenario like world war z or zombieland, where the zombie created rises less than 10 mintues from having died, and every zombie for the most part is a 'fast zombie' that can keep up with or outrun most people, and never tires...

Sprinting zombies are certainly more of a threat than the old-school lurching kind. But I still want to look at those numbers.

That '120,000' is a worldwide figure. Another way of putting it would be "around 400 people per day in Australia".

Of those 400, around 300 are aged over 70, have been ill for a significant time, and probably haven't done anything that could fairly be described as "running" for about 20 years. Even a younger patient who's died after wasting away from cancer or diabetes - doesn't really have the muscles for superhuman feats of strength. The threat from these cases is to the care workers who are looking after them. They're the ones who are going to be doing the rampaging, once they're turned. On day one, a hospital, hospice or funeral home is going to be a very bad place to be.

However, hospices and hospitals tend to employ people who are above average in intelligence and empathy, not prone to panic and random overreaction. Within two hours of the first outbreak in a hospital, I would expect the survivors - who would still outnumber the zombies by something like 50:1, even locally - to have contained most of the zombies in an enclosed area, and be babbling their story to police, who will be inclined to take them seriously because of who they are. Let's say three zombies escape from the hospital and start spreading terror in the surrounding area, say each one manages to average one victim per hour, and it takes the cops two hours to get a response plan into gear.

Then the cops declare a curfew and tell everyone to lock themselves indoors. Let's say it takes another hour for people to respond appropriately to that (actually, experience suggests it would be a lot less, but let's be pessimistic), so now we're looking for 18 zombies. The zombies are clustered and have no notion of stealth or evasion, and by now there are about 150 cops hunting them...

Sounds manageable to me.


The herd mentality of 95% of the people who witness an atrocity simply standing around screaming or even worse 'recording it for youtube'... Man.. It's like a buffet.

Not really. Counter-example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lee_Rigby#Attack). Another would be the Sydney siege - you'll search YouTube in vain for footage of the early stages of that, taken from anyone's cellphone. Ditto the Sandy Hook shooting. I don't think real-life people are as oblivious as you seem to think.


Car crash in a quiet little residential neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon when everyone is at work.

OK. In Australia, on average, there are about four road fatalities a day. Of those four, one is probably a pedestrian who's been tossed 30 feet through the air or crushed against a solid object - they're not going to be running anywhere, magical zombie strength or no, because "running" requires bones that are capable of supporting weight and applying leverage to the frame. Another is trapped in the car, and has to get out of the tangle of metal before they're much of a threat. The third, lacking human memory, can't work out how to undo his seatbelt. The fourth is not wearing a seatbelt, but too bad because the door has crumpled and it's going to need the fire brigade to cut him out of the car.

The threat in all these cases is to the people who see the accident and rush to help. That's what will claim victims on the first day, and the first day will be pretty horrific (in the places there have been fatal car wrecks, anyway). But by the second day, we'll know better.


Poor joseph finally had the big heart attack... rises as a zombie and wanders off to the high school parking lot nearby... Dinner bell... I mean school bell rings and 300 unarmed high school kids join him in a parking lot full of cars and boisterous hormones...

Poor Joseph, a 44-year-old man weighing 350 lbs, is standing in the parking lot with a vacant look on his face. When the first students come out of the door, he opens his mouth wide and starts sprinting toward them at a pace that would do credit to the track team. The students, seeing nothing out of the ordinary in this, continue to... umm, no, that doesn't work for me.


The varsity team swiftly popping their trunks, breaking out the shovels and 'making quick work of poor Joseph' is usually what's NOT going to happen. People in general are not geared to swiftly and decisively react to surprise atrocities with focused, decisive action. People in general scream obscenities and run in random directions or stand there filming.

Not in real life, as far as I can see. Most people, threatened with actual danger, act very quickly to get themselves out of said danger. Unless, of course, they're burdened by an Idiot Ball imposed by a script that requires the zombies to reach horde levels in order to make a good movie.

[SiuiS]

Or another way of looking at it, if you glued orange beanies to 5% of the population's heads and told the other 95% that they needed to kill all the orange-beanied people ASAP, I wouldn't want to be one of the 5% even if I had a supply of glue and beanies to convert others.

That's a good way of framing it.

Do you believe anyone would kill someone and say "oops, I thought he had an orange beanie on"?


Until the 'virus' is cured, the world will see over 120,000 new zombies each day simply from the fact that that's how many people die each day. When I think about a scenario like world war z or zombieland, where the zombie created rises less than 10 mintues from having died, and every zombie for the most part is a 'fast zombie' that can keep up with or outrun most people, and never tires...

I simply don't see it being contained.

Contained means people can handle it routinely. If humans exist beyond day 3, that's going to happen. It's pretty much a given that an apocalypse will only reach terminus – or even threat – if it's got some form of invisible inertia.

That doesn't mean silly people freaking out won't do any harm. :smallsmile:

[Forum Explorer]

Oh relax, Bulldog. I'm poking fun at you. Not because I want a desired "result" (to a scenario where the end result isn't important), but because there's a difference between some people acting intelligently, and everyone acts intelligently and with enough coordination that nothing could go wrong.

I'm fine with zombies not being a threat. I am not fine with 'I'm not going to answer the question in detail because they aren't a threat'. Why respond to say you're not gonna respond?

Other than that, I've asked different and more specific questions to get the information I want. Because I've been asking for information since conception. I've never cared about who would win. Only how and why, in specific. That's why I'm not saying "no zombies totally win bro" or anything. I'm not making an argument. I'm asking questions to see how well you've thought through your answers.

Because again, those answers as to how and why are what interest me.

Honestly SiuiS, I think it's going to vary dramatically from location to location. I've told you how it would likely go down in my hometown, where things would be easily contained before people can even begin to panic.

But your home is much different then mine. So of course things are going to go much differently there.

So how do you think your neighbors and community would react?



Until the 'virus' is cured, the world will see over 120,000 new zombies each day simply from the fact that that's how many people die each day. When I think about a scenario like world war z or zombieland, where the zombie created rises less than 10 mintues from having died, and every zombie for the most part is a 'fast zombie' that can keep up with or outrun most people, and never tires...

I simply don't see it being contained. A headshot against a feral man at full tilt is not as easy as movies make it out to be. Law enforcement would take quite a while to adjust simply because their training is to shoot center mass. Retraining that instinct is harder than the training to shoot center mass in the first place.


That's worldwide. 120 000 people is nothing across the globe. That's not even a hundredth of a percent of the people in the world. Also that's not all at once. People die throughout the day, not all at the same time.

Also? People who die are generally not in the best shape. You are likely very young and can barely move as is, or are very old and can barely move as is. Seriously, I see these people all the time, and they can struggle with everyday stuff like paying for groceries because their muscles are simply degraded that much.

People who die who are in good health? It's generally because of some sort of physical trauma. Which damages and destroys the body til it can't live anymore. If you're lucky the damage is of a type that leaves the body in some kind of shape that allows the zombie some use. But for a fatal car crash? You're looking at severe trauma to the head, neck, spine, and all of the limbs. You know, the sort of damage you use to kill a zombie in the first place. And as Veti pointed out, the vehicle itself will trap them inside in a fatal car accident. People who get hit by cars, generally have it even worse.

Then there are people who die due to animal attacks. Their body is already torn up and being eaten before they can even get up. You can consider those all ineligible for zombies as well.

People who die of sickness, well again, the sickness kills them by damaging their body. It may not break bones, but you can bet the muscles will be pretty deteriorated before death becomes a factor.

Of course all these people will still become zombies, and there are forms that do minimal amounts of damage (death by suffocation, cold, gunshot wounds to the chest, blood loss, and drug overdoses) will create full power zombies. But the majority? Will be significantly weaker then an average person.


But even in your worst case scenario and thousands are (somehow) getting killed by zombies in the first day? It still won't matter, because if even a single military individual keeps their head he/she can handle the whole situation because zombies cannot do anything to a tank. Ever.



Finally? It's also a matter of location. Like I said earlier in the thread only 82 people per day die in my home province. We have over 820 cops in my home city alone. We have over 10 police officers for every single zombie. The ratio is so out of favor for the zombie's it's insane.

(quick google search tells me that 22 000 children die everyday. How effective do you think a zombie baby will be? How about a zombie 10 year old? Cause that's about 17% of the zombies per day you get)

[Coidzor]

That's a good way of framing it.

Do you believe anyone would kill someone and say "oops, I thought he had an orange beanie on"?

They'd have to be pretty daft to think they'd be able to get away with it, but, conceivably, yes, there are many, many stupid people in the world, but not as many in the way that misanthropes prefer to think of others.


Of those 400, around 300 are aged over 70, have been ill for a significant time, and probably haven't done anything that could fairly be described as "running" for about 20 years.

Exactly, that's what makes grandma even more dangerous. Your mind can't accept that she's a zombie with superhuman athleticism dedicated solely to eating your brains and that makes you go stereotypical zombie movie human stupid in response as critical components of your various lobes and cortexes shut down in self-defense and/or disgust. :smallamused:

[veti]

Honestly SiuiS, I think it's going to vary dramatically from location to location. I've told you how it would likely go down in my hometown, where things would be easily contained before people can even begin to panic.

But your home is much different then mine. So of course things are going to go much differently there.

So how do you think your neighbors and community would react?

I've answered that for my city. Maybe it's just complacency, but I see lurching zombies as a negligible threat that would create more horror than fear, and no major social upheaval.

Sprinting zombies would be more of a worry, but I think the initial outbreak would be manageable, and as SiuiS says, by day 3 it's effectively all over.

Either way, I don't see civilisation breaking down. Not here anyway.


(quick google search tells me that 22 000 children die everyday. How effective do you think a zombie baby will be? How about a zombie 10 year old? Cause that's about 17% of the zombies per day you get)

For the most part I agree with you. But a zombie child may be a very real threat to one group of able-bodied adults: its parents. That was easily the most horrific scene in the original Night of the Living Dead, and has been imitated many times since. Even a zombie baby has a good chance of turning its entire family.

Don't write them off.

Another point that we're glossing over is the long term effect on society. At present, it's normal for people to help those who obviously need it. People will run to the scene of an accident. If I see someone stumble and fall on the pavement, or lying down by the roadside, I'll ask them if they need help. That would all change.

On the other hand, treatment of the homeless might actually improve. Currently, someone who starves or freezes on the street is, to most people, Somebody Else's Problem. That would change. I can see much more resources being funnelled into creating decent shelters, and making sure people get at least one good meal a day.

[Killer Angel]

Exactly, that's what makes grandma even more dangerous.

...and now, I'm thinking to Start of Darkness. :smalltongue:

[VincentTakeda]

Oh I agree. If we're only talking about lethargic stumblin shufflin zombies, that would be easy to contain. A brisk walk would ensure your survivability. If you're threat level is 'zombies can't outrun a fat man with asthma', you're kinda setting your own limits on the definition of an outbreak. Since this is theory.. Theater of the mind where every definition is fiat... You're calvinballing a human victory there. Humanity wins because they can jog at a faster pace until someone with a solution shows up... Barely qualifies as an outbreak/apocalypse in my mind.

[Tyndmyr]

Doesn't matter. Team zombie is irrelevant; we only care about the trials team human faces. I'm not saying zombies would win, I'msaying your variables are variable enough that we should postulate likely outcomes before just saying "guns exist, so let's stop looking at this branch entirely".

If you don't have a mechanism to get an actual hoard of zombies, then the zombies simply get eliminated before they become an actual threat. You need a way for the zombies to multiply. If the zombies are vastly outnumbered by humans, as per the original example, they simply aren't a big deal. The cops get called, a zombie get shot, the end.


For every other disaster? Yes. That's the tragedy of it. And the beauty.

I'm sure you could find someone within two degrees of you that would gladly die heroically saving someone from a volcano or rebuild an entire city after an earthquake, who would immediately go "zombies! Worlds ending, time to go full frikken steam punk!".

90% of the problems in a zombie uprising are human caused, because they expect someone will cause these problems so why not benefit?

Yes, because for THIS disaster, human nature suddenly changes...why again? Is there an actual reason?


:smallconfused: the threat goes from zero to millions of corpses trying to murder you in the space of 23:59 to 00:00. The human reaction takes magnitudes longer.

No. It goes from millions of corpses trying to murder BILLIONS of humans, who outnumber them by about 1800 to 1, are better armed and equipped(because NO zombies have weapons better than hands and teeth), and are vastly smarter. Also, the corpses start off with the disadvantage that most of them are buried, or otherwise incapacitated. This is a ludicrously one sided fight, and the element of surprise does not even vaguely compensate for that.


An ambulance trundles into my apartment complex every month. Someone is late on their rent. Power company calls to say they aren't paying. Management goes to check. We've had three survivors of the fallen/can't get up variety, and several deaths.

I live on the water front. I live in a county where human trafficking and prostitution related fatalities are... Commonish, though swept under the rug. I live in a city where pizza delivery guys being a buddy to avoid gunpoint robbery, and where multiple robberies lead to attacks so the driver can't point out a guy later.

I work a register where over the last four years, twelve of the original eighty transient population remain. Ten moved away. Seven are in prison. Many are "missing", usually after turf wars with other transients. The highway and railways aren't city property so the cops don't check there.

Death is all around. We've designed the facade of society so we don't really see it, but it's there. It's why you have to go out of the residential areas to see homeless shelters, halfway houses, clinics, and hospices.

And the natural fallout of this? That all those deaths all get shunted to one place? That's not a good thing. It means you do start with a wandering horde.

You don't just have a pile of loose dead bodies anywhere. They're boxed in coffins, or in drawers at a morgue, or otherwise contained. The 'facade' means they are unable to really do much of anything to affect us.


Who cares? Credibility is not an argument. You do not need to assume that your death will be inevitable, here. You need to assume (rightfully) that people will act to ensure their death isn't inevitable. That's all. The only thing you, the respondent, need to worry about are human psychology, group instinct, and tribal inclinations.

The only reason to worry about zombie details at all is if you believe that basic psychology won't come into it for some reason. And frankly, we're talking about the species that thinks antibiotics make asthma better, and that dipping medicine in water magically makes that water medicinal.

So, you talk about psychology, but discard that credibility is important. And also you've discarded historical comparisons to actual disaster psychology. What are you actually basing it on then? Zombie movies?

Look, zombie movies are genre stuff. Everything happens a certain way, because that's how things are "supposed" to go. It's no more accurate than proposing humans can shoot their way out of alien encounters because that's how every alien movie goes. We all understand what zombies are supposed to look like. A shambling hoard of groaning dead covered in rags coming after the wildly outnumbered living. That doesn't mean it is realistic.

Hell, what's with the rags, even? Mostly, we bury our dead in suits and such. In any scenario where only the recently dead arise, the undead hoard should look pretty stylish.

[Killer Angel]

No. It goes from millions of corpses trying to murder BILLIONS of humans, who outnumber them by about 1800 to 1, are better armed and equipped(because NO zombies have weapons better than hands and teeth), and are vastly smarter.

To be fair, millions of corpses outnumber the police. And in Europe, civilians are usually unarmed. The first day will be hard, before the full potential of national armies comes into play.

[VincentTakeda]

When I close my eyes, I like to imagine that the first people to die in a zombie apocalypse are the sorts of people that stand around pontificating on how 'zombies work'. With their dying breath they furrow their brow and with stern indignation say 'see. I told you so... urggggg.'

[SiuiS]

Honestly SiuiS, I think it's going to vary dramatically from location to location.

I know. That's why I bothered with a thread on a global forum. It's also why the answers being A) about who wins and B) the global result are so frustrating. My fault for supplying too much information, but I (ironically) didn't want the first page bogged down with requests for information on how zombies are even functioning. I tried to cut that off so people could focus on the query.


They'd have to be pretty daft to think they'd be able to get away with it, but, conceivably, yes, there are many, many stupid people in the world, but not as many in the way that misanthropes prefer to think of others.

Indeed. I just happen to move in circles where that sort of stupidity is the norm. Which makes relative stupidity very, very disheartening...



Exactly, that's what makes grandma even more dangerous. Your mind can't accept that she's a zombie with superhuman athleticism dedicated solely to eating your brains and that makes you go stereotypical zombie movie human stupid in response as critical components of your various lobes and cortexes shut down in self-defense and/or disgust. :smallamused:

Well, that, and the limits aren't quite so bad. Broken bones are not so much an impediment unless the bone is ground to sand. Cut tendons are a bigger issue; even mostly ripped musculature still works enough to, well, work.

Grandma may have had a hard time producing the skeletomuscular impulses to move with speed and coordination when she relied on atrophied muscles, withered bones and adenosine triphosphate for function, but now she's a perfectly efficient set of weak pulleys. Still physically weak, but some of the limits are removed by sheer virtue of animated dead.

Strictly a surprise value though. Physical force is physical force. A broken zombie is still broken. It's just not as intuitive how that works.


If you don't have a mechanism to get an actual hoard of zombies, then the zombies simply get eliminated before they become an actual threat.

Okay, cool. The question you're answering is "how do people react to a zombie threat" though. The threat is implied to beenoughto provoke a reaction. That's the basic premise.

This isn't a versus thread. Threat/not threat, win/lose don't matter. You wake up to find that for the last eight hours, the dead walk and are somehow killing people and turning them into walking dead. Suicide rates are up. They are also walking dead.
How do you react? How do your neighbors react? Blow by blow. Hour by hour. Day by day. Stop when you're confident the authorities would contain it.



Yes, because for THIS disaster, human nature suddenly changes...why again? Is there an actual reason?


> publicly available knowledge of preppers
> publicly available records of waiting for this exact scenario
> publicly available declarations of intent
> somehow not premeditated, accounting for this is 'change I. Human nature'.

[The Glyphstone]

Hell, what's with the rags, even? Mostly, we bury our dead in suits and such. In any scenario where only the recently dead arise, the undead horde should look pretty stylish.

Night of the Fashionable Dead, coming soon to theaters.

[Coidzor]

Hell, what's with the rags, even? Mostly, we bury our dead in suits and such. In any scenario where only the recently dead arise, the undead hoard should look pretty stylish.

:smallconfused: I mostly recall ones whose clothing has been torn up by what lead to them getting caught by the other zombies and turned in the first place and guys in torn up funerary clothing that was dirty from bashing through their coffin, clawing out of their cement vault, and then digging their way to the surface.


Indeed. I just happen to move in circles where that sort of stupidity is the norm. Which makes relative stupidity very, very disheartening...

Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but since you're at least aware of that, maybe you should take that into account when you talk to others. :smalltongue:


Well, that, and the limits aren't quite so bad. Broken bones are not so much an impediment unless the bone is ground to sand.

Only because you've disabled friction and natural forces on the zombies unless it's penetration of their gray matter. :smalltongue:


Cut tendons are a bigger issue; even mostly ripped musculature still works enough to, well, work.

But does it make it so that every zombie can at least shamble or crawl or well enough that every zombie is now an olympic sprinter on steroids with parkour abiliites?


IGrandma may have had a hard time producing the skeletomuscular impulses to move with speed and coordination when she relied on atrophied muscles, withered bones and adenosine triphosphate for function, but now she's a perfectly efficient set of weak pulleys. Still physically weak, but some of the limits are removed by sheer virtue of animated dead.

Strictly a surprise value though. Physical force is physical force. A broken zombie is still broken. It's just not as intuitive how that works.

That sounds like a change in tone and position from your earlier statements about how they're magic and physically superior to living humans in every way. :smallconfused:


Okay, cool. The question you're answering is "how do people react to a zombie threat" though. The threat is implied to beenoughto provoke a reaction. That's the basic premise.

Do you have a leg to stand on in your argument that zombies wouldn't provoke a reaction? :smalltongue:


Suicide rates are up. They are also walking dead.

Well that's a problematic premise. Why would people keep committing suicide in droves to avoid becoming zombies once they know that committing suicide turns you into a zombie? :smalltongue:


How do you react? How do your neighbors react? Blow by blow. Hour by hour. Day by day. Stop when you're confident the authorities would contain it.

I live in the middle of nowhere and have enough food to last several weeks and guns and a fairly defensible position with good visibility of the approaches that zombies could take as long as they're not ridiculous parkour supermen that can basically leap around like they're the freaking hulk from that one series of movies that got rebooted almost immediately because they were bad. Aside from asking the neighbours if they want to pool resources in the most defensible of our positions and fortify in case of people getting Fallout Raider level stupid, I've got nothing to worry about from a short term zombie outbreak before it's been contained.

Obviously I can't predict how every human is going to react, you can't either. :smalltongue:

[SiuiS]

Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but since you're at least aware of that, maybe you should take that into account when you talk to others. :smalltongue:

I am. That's why I'm crowd sourcing!



Only because you've disabled friction and natural forces on the zombies unless it's penetration of their gray matter. :smalltongue:

No, depending on the specifics, a break that woul kill or incapacitate a human can remain semi function strictly due to muscular action.


But does it make it so that every zombie can at least shamble or crawl or well enough that every zombie is now an olympic sprinter on steroids with parkour abiliites?


Why would a zombie need to be an Olympic traceur?



That sounds like a change in tone and position from your earlier statements about how they're magic and physically superior to living humans in every way. :smallconfused:


This just confirms that people are reading responses to me as my own words.

Please quote where zombies are assumed to be physically superhuman?


Do you have a leg to stand on in your argument that zombies wouldn't provoke a reaction? :smalltongue:


:smallconfused: this thread is based on my premise that there would be a reaction. Why would I think there wouldn't?


Well that's a problematic premise. Why would people keep committing suicide in droves to avoid becoming zombies once they know that committing suicide turns you into a zombie? :smalltongue:

Something about "this is zero hour, what do" is being lost in translation here. Yes, given enough time everything will be solved. You do not have that time. This is the start of the clock. You know nothing. You feel you need to do something. What do you do? Honestly, at this point you're just picking things apart because you can.

[Coidzor]

No, depending on the specifics, a break that woul kill or incapacitate a human can remain semi function strictly due to muscular action.

It should still wear down and worsen, but you've disabled the whole zombies will break their bodies down further as a natural consequence of being zombies.


Why would a zombie need to be an Olympic traceur?

That's what you were coming off as saying, mostly.


This just confirms that people are reading responses to me as my own words.

Please quote where zombies are assumed to be physically superhuman?

So you're not saying they're able to run super fast without tripping, falling, or damaging themselves when they do while also being stronger than a human because they don't have human limitations to prevent us from damaging ourselves but they don't also damage themselves when they do it?


:smallconfused: this thread is based on my premise that there would be a reaction. Why would I think there wouldn't?

You were just chastising us for assuming there'd be a reaction, weren't you? :smallconfused:


Something about "this is zero hour, what do" is being lost in translation here. Yes, given enough time everything will be solved. You do not have that time. This is the start of the clock. You know nothing. You feel you need to do something. What do you do? Honestly, at this point you're just picking things apart because you can.

I suppose I'd start cleaning the guns, taking stock of my tools and materials, and fortifying my position with various impediments that would slow or immobilize whatever was left of a zombie after going through rough country. Possibly also create a series of roadblocks to discourage people from driving down the roads nearby until services are restored. Even just felling a sizeable tree into the road should discourage all but the most hardcore looters and also slow zombies to a significant extent without proving to be a significant impediment to military forces.

[Bulldog Psion]

From my viewpoint, what I would do if I saw a zombie shambling along the road outside. I'm assuming here that I'm not just ambushed and killed, because that means I wouldn't be doing anything. Other than shambling, maybe. :smallwink:

1. Call the police and tell them there's a bizarre-acting person out on the sidewalk, possibly on drugs or seriously ill in some way.

2. Get my rifle down and put bullets in it, just in case, and then set it on the table within easy reach, if I was disturbed enough at the person's appearance.

3. Watch the odd person, preferably without revealing my presence.

4. Wait for the police to show up and see what happens, because I'm cursed with curiosity. I'd probably see the zombie charge them and get mowed down.

5. Try to find out what happened.

6. Go about my business until I saw other signs of infestation.

7. As soon as I realized it was a "thing," I would place my rifle in my van, collect my wife, and drive to the store and buy a lot of food. I would also buy a couple water filters and fill my gas tank.

8. Return home, start looking on the Internet and making phone calls to determine what was happening. Door would be locked; curtains drawn; if I was alarmed enough, I would probably try to find time to nail boards across the windows (my cellar is full of spare boards) at about 6" intervals to slow or stop anything trying to break in.

9. If the situation in the city appeared to be heading south in any way, I would depart and go to my parents' home way out in the country. In a little town where everybody knows each other and everyone has guns.

10. If the situation wasn't that alarming, I'd go around checking on the other people in the neighborhood, and try to talk them into setting up some sort of system for mutual support. Perhaps moving more vulnerable people into other people's houses temporarily, or doubling up for safety in larger homes.

11. Keep an eye out; shoot anything that shambled; communicate any and all valuable information to the authorities quickly and accurately; play it by ear when to stay and when to attempt a departure, if necessary.

12. If I realized that ALL the dead rose fairly fast as zombies, I would try to get people to list all the seriously ill and very old people in the neighborhood. And then go around and check on them daily. Not alone. And armed. A bit grim and morbid, but likely to forestall, ah, surprises.

Now, I would be creeped out as all heck. But I know that in a crisis, people who panic often die, and people who act thoughtfully and keep control of themselves often live. I would attempt to instill this in the other people in the neighborhood also.

That's how it would "go down" in my tiny castle, anyway.

[SiuiS]

It should still wear down and worsen, but you've disabled the whole zombies will break their bodies down further as a natural consequence of being zombies.


That's really less my disabling anything and more how they are shown to work. Otherwise how would you have the things still around, hale and hardy, fifty years down the road?

I explicitly listed it because otherwise I have to deal with smart Alecs saying "despite zombies being animated corpses, there is absolutely nothing going on that prevents them from just grinding to dust in days because science!" And dropping their mic. That's self evidently wrong, considering.



So you're not saying they're able to run super fast without tripping, falling, or damaging themselves when they do while also being stronger than a human because they don't have human limitations to prevent us from damaging ourselves but they don't also damage themselves when they do it?


Ignoring pain is one thing; yeah there's a lot you could do if you weren't worried about straining yourself. That's not superhuman in any way, though.

Running?
No tripping ever?
Quotes, please. I've said 'power walk'. But again, this is mostly pointing out the obvious. And again, it's so people will think about the human reaction instead of disassembling the zombie problem.



You were just chastising us for assuming there'd be a reaction, weren't you? :smallconfused:


No, sir. I was saying there would be a reaction, stop glossing over it and saying 'we'll win eventually so who cares, zombies are dumb'.

If it's a language screw up in my part, show me. I would like to fix it before I confuse anyone else.


The rest, I'm not sure how much you're just getting my goat. You're making the step from 'this scenario is absurd' (it is!) to 'you're absurd' and I'm reacting to that. It's probably a relic of your speech patterns and I'm being over sensitive. Sorry.

[BeerMug Paladin]

It's been a while since I've replied here, but I actually do have something to add.

Considering that the sheer existence of zombies is by itself a drastic violation of physical forces, I think it would be somewhat erroneous to be very confident about their nature or their abilities, or the consequences of their existence. Even about things which seem like they ought to be a given.

After all, the only thing we could know for certain is that something very wrong is happening.

I'll grant that the common depiction of zombies don't generally portray anything deeper about physical reality being broken or wrong. They just present zombies as more or less an immediate threat to be combated in an up front fashion. But their mere existence should indicate something about one's knowledge is very broken. And in this case, the unknown could easily kill you if you make an assumption you have no reason to make.

In terms of society, what this would mean is that culture would experience a shift in viewpoint similar to what the advent of quantum mechanics and relativity theory did for the public consciousness. Those were big deals because they fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe and ourselves in relation to it. And once scientists begin to investigate this new phenomenon in greater detail, a similar thing would occur. What exactly that cultural shift is depends on what it could imply in the public perception.

In the more immediate, this aspect could wind up with having some people make what they think is a reasonable assumption about the zombies that there is absolutely no reason to think is true. (IE, that they would 'obviously' decay after a few days to non-functionality.) If their assertion winds up being false, it could lead to a decision which causes their own death.

I imagine some people/regions might generally have better initial guesses at the nature of the threat, correctly deal with it on such terms, and be better off for it. These places would be bastions of research and learning compared to worse hit regions. They would deal with the problem on a local level, then potentially deal with it on a regional/global level.

In places with unsuccessful initial strategies, nerds smart enough to realize this sort of thing is an issue would probably get pummeled until they shut up, or just die. Science philosophy is kind of irritating, complicated and boring. Fear is universal, simplicity is calming, and dissent is often dangerous in such circumstances. The right kind of charismatic leader can/(often does) take advantage of fear to gain power for their own ends in such situations. (Which is essentially a major theme of the genre of fiction.)

On a related note, depicting how large scale societies and large groups would respond is usually glossed over, probably because nobody has a very thorough idea of how it would play out in reality. That's a pretty difficult thing to concieve. But I suspect it's also partly to avoid potentially offending political sensibilites (since how nations make decisions on a large scale is pretty much what politics is, an honest attempt to depict this could easily come across as preachy and offensive).

But various cultures/societies would probably all try different strategies and techniques. Undoubtedly, some would work better than others, and the successful tactics would spread to other regions depending on the modes of communication still available. For this reason, I think people would fairly rapidly arrive at the best way of handling the zombie menace (given their particular needs), given the specific rules of the outbreak. And that's something you'll know about your own rules more than I would know.

With a global information network, I imagine most of these differences in initial conditions would be ironed out on a scale of days or weeks as opposed to months or years. Probably the worst places to be would be places where the communication networks go down within the first few days (or never existed in the first place), either due to other natural disasters, or because of unforeseen human error. Those are the kinds of things that aren't predictable, and such issues might delay things improving in those regions for months or years before some semblence of order is restored.

I realize I'm once again giving generalities and not particulars, but I approach this question in this way because I think it would be an inherently unpredictable situation. I think that a tremendous amount of diversity would happen in the way people approach this scenario, so the particulars of what actually would happen (small scale and short term) could justifiably be almost anything. I will try to give some particulars for my own behavior though. Assuming I am within a less well off area.

1) Hide. End strategem.

2) Be amazed if any of those people I know that would, "Totally come get me, specifically, to help rebuild civilization with my awesome smarts" came to actually get me.

3), given 2) Probably become a really terrible ad-hoc mechanical engineer. And help build fortifications, repair power sources, phone lines, construct weapons, work on cars. Whatever may be needed/wanted at the moment.

4), given 3) I imagine I would be eventually desensitized to the violence and insanity of everything. I'd probably start doing mad science on the zombies in the sheer hope that I could discover something useful/interesting. Crazy hair/costume optional.

[veti]

I'll grant that the common depiction of zombies don't generally portray anything deeper about physical reality being broken or wrong. They just present zombies as more or less an immediate threat to be combated in an up front fashion. But their mere existence should indicate something about one's knowledge is very broken. And in this case, the unknown could easily kill you if you make an assumption you have no reason to make.

I think this is really quite insightful, and an area we haven't touched on yet. And I think you're underestimating it:


In terms of society, what this would mean is that culture would experience a shift in viewpoint similar to what the advent of quantum mechanics and relativity theory did for the public consciousness. Those were big deals because they fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe and ourselves in relation to it.

They were big deals for people who were interested in fundamental physics, but not so much for the other 97% of the population. The great majority may have been dimly aware of the geeky ones getting all excited and confused, but it would be years or decades before the shift filtered through into anything that could really be called "public consciousness". And to this day, most people still neither know nor care why these things matter.

Zombies would be rather more intrusive than that.

I would predict a lot of people pinning a lot of hope on medical science developing a "cure". As the months went by, and story after story broke about how they completely failed to identify any kind of "infection", many people - very likely, including many scientists - would begin to lose their faith in the power of "science" to answer questions, and I can imagine a major religious revival. (Obviously that would begin to happen immediately, but I can imagine it gaining a lot of momentum as the story went on and on.)

How that would work out - would have something to do with the nature of existing religions in that society. The danger would be charismatic, evil people. In some places, which I won't name because that would take me too close to Forbidden Topics, the religious establishment is already well loaded with people like that, who could do some very unpleasant things with a crisis like this; in others, the religious establishment is old and tired and tame, and anyone with an ounce of ambition doesn't go near it, so they'd be in opposition to people like that.

[BeerMug Paladin]

They were big deals for people who were interested in fundamental physics, but not so much for the other 97% of the population. The great majority may have been dimly aware of the geeky ones getting all excited and confused, but it would be years or decades before the shift filtered through into anything that could really be called "public consciousness". And to this day, most people still neither know nor care why these things matter.

Zombies would be rather more intrusive than that.

I was more referring to the long term impact and its cultural relevance. Most of the cultural impact of relativity/quantum mechanics isn't directly felt. It was first communicated by scientists and mathematicians, then later generations expanded on it via philosophers and engineers, then eventually by writers and artists. By the time it reaches the last stages, the message is less precisely accurate, but the approach is still largely about addressing the concepts' meaning and implications to everyday humans.

Although I do agree the whole process here would both be much faster and directly impact a much broader segment of society. But that's because as a paradigm shift, it's happening to everyone, and not just a select few elites.


I would predict a lot of people pinning a lot of hope on medical science developing a "cure". As the months went by, and story after story broke about how they completely failed to identify any kind of "infection", many people - very likely, including many scientists - would begin to lose their faith in the power of "science" to answer questions...

Whether or not science and rigorous logical study could be capable of learning more may or may not be up for question (as this really depends on the rules of the setting as determined by the author). But I do agree that in general, the public has an overwhelming confidence that science will solve all the problems. When a charlatan has bunk to promote, it's usually couched in vaguely science sounding terms for this exact reason.

As for what would happen "in reality", well, I happen to hold the philosophical position that the fundamental rules of science hold in (almost) any universe concievable. So, if I were writing the story, science would still work to reflect that attitude. It just might not tell us something we could make immediate use of. Science may be able to investigate any meaningful question, but that doesn't mean it will always produce a functionally useful answer.

The stuff about society experiencing a resurgence of interest in the mystical. Well, people of all eras (and backgrounds) have enjoyed having easy answers to difficult quandries. If science can't provide a simple enough context to cope with such a threat and an alternative viewpoint could, I suspect the alternative could gain some notability and renewed interest for that reason.

And if science were providing an easy answer, it's probably likely just bunk being peddled by an aforementioned charlatan. Remember, just because someone highly regards science, doesn't mean they could necessarily recognize when something isn't actually founded in science. This seems to be another possibility other than consciously abandoning science in general, and this possibility is kind of interesting to me.

[Tyndmyr]

:smallconfused: I mostly recall ones whose clothing has been torn up by what lead to them getting caught by the other zombies and turned in the first place and guys in torn up funerary clothing that was dirty from bashing through their coffin, clawing out of their cement vault, and then digging their way to the surface.

Walking Dead, I suppose, would be one such example. Zombies routinely look pretty jacked up. Clothing tends to be pretty horrible. Survivors apparently have time to shave and tend their hair and so forth. Hell, a lot of zombies just sort of chill while waiting for victims, providing a standard mark 1 jump scare, but look more bedraggled than the survivors that have been doing crazy stuff for hours of screen time.

It's just kind of an odd genre quirk.



Okay, cool. The question you're answering is "how do people react to a zombie threat" though. The threat is implied to beenoughto provoke a reaction. That's the basic premise.

But...the threat as assumed does not match the stated scenario. I know exactly how people would react to that scenario. It just isn't as if it were an existential threat, because it's not.

Long story short, you're upset because my "what would happen" is different than what you think would happen. But...isn't that difference of opinion exactly what such a thread exists to discuss?


This isn't a versus thread. Threat/not threat, win/lose don't matter. You wake up to find that for the last eight hours, the dead walk and are somehow killing people and turning them into walking dead. Suicide rates are up. They are also walking dead.
How do you react? How do your neighbors react? Blow by blow. Hour by hour. Day by day. Stop when you're confident the authorities would contain it.

I would be pretty curious about what it was that caused such an improbable state of affairs. For one thing, suicides don't increase after natural disasters. Suicides are a result of issues like depression, the whole world doesn't actually just decide to off themselves en masse because the tv is reporting about zombies. That's just a basic misinterpretations of how suicides work. You might see suicides increase long AFTER the event, because someone who lost family members sinks into depression or something, but that's not a morning after problem.

Me? I'd wake up. I don't really watch tv in the morning. I'd drive to work. If I saw crazy crap, or got a telephone call, I might change this pattern. I wake up late. Authorities would have contained it by the time I get to work. People would no doubt be super panicky on the television, just like for ebola or whatever. There would probably be a quarantine wherever it broke out. It would actually affect fairly few lives.

[Grim Portent]

I'd expect pretty much no real damage anywhere in the developed world, the developing world would probably have a much bigger problem, though some nations are militarised enough that they could avoid the major issues.

I wouldn't expect much of a change in how society functions other than people who work with the injured, sick or elderly being either armed or accompanied by people who are armed. The mutilation and cremation of the deceased would become standard practice in nations where it can be done, nations that lack the capacity to easily burn bodies would likely settle for mutilation.

Big chunks of areas that were vulnerable and lacked the means to contain the threat, which would basically be very small parts of the least developed nations in the world, would likely have roaming bands of zombies left behind when people fled that will last until environmental effects or animals kill them all.

Probably an increase in spirituality, at least for a while. I expect it would decrease again as time progressed and people got over the whole 'zombies are real' thing.

Increased numbers of hospices and homeless shelters would be likely as measures to minimise unobserved deaths.

[SiuiS]

It's been a while since I've replied here, but I actually do have something to add.

Considering that the sheer existence of zombies is by itself a drastic violation of physical forces, I think it would be somewhat erroneous to be very confident about their nature or their abilities, or the consequences of their existence. Even about things which seem like they ought to be a given.

After all, the only thing we could know for certain is that something very wrong is happening.


This is a very good depiction of what I was trying to work with, than you. I think you're right though; the actual question is simply too big to answer. Each level of society would react differently, and the end result would be an unpredictable current.

I think the fundamental idea, there, of something being broken about the world, somehow, is a good one. Often unexplored, too. The issue becomes how to frame that such that it's not just met with "pfff, nuh-uh!", and also without diminishing the concept to a size that is easily answered.


Walking Dead, I suppose, would be one such example. Zombies routinely look pretty jacked up. Clothing tends to be pretty horrible. Survivors apparently have time to shave and tend their hair and so forth. Hell, a lot of zombies just sort of chill while waiting for victims, providing a standard mark 1 jump scare, but look more bedraggled than the survivors that have been doing crazy stuff for hours of screen time.

It's just kind of an odd genre quirk.


Walking dead goes through pains to keep the look authentic, with some caveats for camera accessibility. The people who shave have kits for shaving, or scissors. They also tend to have terrible and simple hair cuts, visible mending and such.

Other shows/movies don't so that much though.



But...the threat as assumed does not match the stated scenario. I know exactly how people would react to that scenario. It just isn't as if it were an existential threat, because it's not.

Science is broken and that doesn't shake up anything at all? :smallconfused:

I have been relying on the difference between reality and perception since the start. Much like pain; the actual pain one experiences when punched is much less than the stress and fear they experience at the thought of being punched in a tense situation. People who could easily handle being punched will react as if they cannot because until it happens, they aren't certain they can handle it. It causes illogical reactions when viewed objectively.

Zombies may end up not being a threat. Where I take umbrage is the idea that all people know this immediately and no one in the world reacts poorly out of fear or superstition because of it. I'm okay with you expecting a different set of occurrences. I'm less okay with the casual dismissal of the possibility that anything could happen.

I'll try and think of RL examples for you that don't involve verboten topics. It's very frustrating to have models from reality that perfectly demonstrate, that I can't share.



I would be pretty curious about what it was that caused such an improbable state of affairs. For one thing, suicides don't increase after natural disasters. Suicides are a result of issues like depression, the whole world doesn't actually just decide to off themselves en masse because the tv is reporting about zombies. That's just a basic misinterpretations of how suicides work. You might see suicides increase long AFTER the event, because someone who lost family members sinks into depression or something, but that's not a morning after problem.

*shrug* verboten topics. It has been grasped by enough people thus far that I do not believe it's erroneous to make the conclusion I did.



Probably an increase in spirituality, at least for a while. I expect it would decrease again as time progressed and people got over the whole 'zombies are real' thing.

That's interesting. Do you feel people can normalize and compartmentalize a clearly supernatural occurrence when it is documented and routine?

[Grim Portent]

That's interesting. Do you feel people can normalize and compartmentalize a clearly supernatural occurrence when it is documented and routine?

Humans are very adaptive psychologically, it takes a great deal to change their worldview.

Provided it isn't shoved in their faces over a long period of time, and after containment that ceases to be an issue in the developed world, humans would gradually start to think of the zombies as just being part of the world. To later generations they'd have always been there and the original survivors would be split among different faiths and philosophies arguing over what the zombies are/represent, and scientists trying to understand them. It may take a while, but eventually the developed world would drift back towards a less religious society, especially if their faith provides no answers to the situation.

Actually thinking about it, fervent followers of religions with doomsday prophecies could become a destabilising risk to society in such an event, believing that the dead rising is just the start of a wider chain of events.

[stcfg]

That's interesting. Do you feel people can normalize and compartmentalize a clearly supernatural occurrence when it is documented and routine?

I'm not sure what is the difference between a supernatural occurrence that is documented and routine and a natural occurrence.

If magic was discovered and well documented enough, it would probably be more like the discovery of electricity. When electricity was discovered is probably was like magic to people that didn't understand it.

A scientific revolution would happen and the model for how people understand the universe would change but that doesn't mean that all science is broken.

[Killer Angel]

Do you feel people can normalize and compartmentalize a clearly supernatural occurrence when it is documented and routine?

Supernatural occurrences, tend to lose a lot of their exceptionality, if they become a daily routine.

[SiuiS]

I'm not sure what is the difference between a supernatural occurrence that is documented and routine and a natural occurrence.

If magic was discovered and well documented enough, it would probably be more like the discovery of electricity. When electricity was discovered is probably was like magic to people that didn't understand it.

A scientific revolution would happen and the model for how people understand the universe would change but that doesn't mean that all science is broken.

It's a big jump from death animating and moving due to supernatural forces, and discovering magic.


Supernatural occurrences, tend to lose a lot of their exceptionality, if they become a daily routine.

Aye, normally. I think the constant push to discover how it functions would keep that candle burning though.


*


As an aside, how does radiation affect dead tissue? I know radiation poisoning will kill a living creature. Would it degrade an already dead one? Ignoring for the moment that the difference between sunlight and fallout is simply type and magnitude.

[veti]

As an aside, how does radiation affect dead tissue? I know radiation poisoning will kill a living creature. Would it degrade an already dead one? Ignoring for the moment that the difference between sunlight and fallout is simply type and magnitude.

Radiation has been used to preserve some forms of dead tissue, because it kills bacteria that would otherwise degrade it. I would imagine that prolonged exposure to low-intensity radiation would 'cure' dead meat, but what effect that would have on zombies is anyone's guess.

Presumably sufficiently-intense radiation would burn tissue, and damage it in the same way as sufficiently-intense heat.

[VincentTakeda]

So we're uh... Trying to make beef jerky with a microwave?

[veti]

So we're uh... Trying to make beef jerky with a microwave?

The radiation inside a microwave is definitely toward what I'd call the "intense" end of that range. Cooking is just burning that's stopped early.

[Killer Angel]

The radiation inside a microwave is definitely toward what I'd call the "intense" end of that range. Cooking is just burning that's stopped early.

Eh, but we need a large microwave oven, to lure the zombies in it...

[Erloas]

One thing to consider is that this is one of those cases where we've got the same word meaning different things. Radiation from a microwave is different than radiation from something that is radioactive, and radiation poisoning is excessive exposure to radioactive particles.

I actually think if we've got zombies that are immune to the elements they would mostly be unaffected by a microwave, but since they aren't immune to catching fire, I would think you would have to have a very strong microwave focused on them for a long period of time.

I'm not sure on radiation poisoning exactly, but the biggest problem with radiation exposure is the mutation of genes and the destruction/screwing with the natural regeneration of tissue in living bodies. Since zombies don't heal long term exposure to radiation shouldn't really do anything to them. And a quick search of radiation poisoning is the same thing as long term exposure, just enough that it starts much sooner.


The radiation causes cellular degradation due to damage to DNA and other key molecular structures within the cells in various tissues; this destruction, particularly as it affects ability of cells to divide normally, in turn causes the symptoms.
That was from radiation sickness, so pretty much exactly the same thing as long term exposure. So it would seem as long as they "survive" the initial blast they should be mostly unaffected. This wouldn't be the case with other virus style zombie scenarios, but in this supernatural one it should be.

[holygroundj]

Zombie apocalypse is my one irrational fear. If you boil it down to more rational thoughts, I would say my biggest fear is something like the Road coming to fruition. Something breaks the government's hold on the law itself and then the enforced community breaks down as people fend for themselves. Since i have no survival related skills, I'm the first to go.

Man the Road was depressing. Sometimes, when I read that book again, I always stop when they find the hole in the ground.

[Donnadogsoth]

I think it would be contained within a week. I don't see the problem. Where are all these "living dead" coming from? Most of the dead people are in the ground or scattered as ashes. I suppose a few might be in the morgue, and some more trapped in crashed vehicles. I'd say the military gets called in, spreads out, and the problem is over inside a week.

[VincentTakeda]

I do agree that if we're just talking about slow dumb shambling zombies yeah.
I can't imagine this getting out of hand much in the first place.
Particularly in places where private gun ownership is a thing.

That's why if you're gonna go for a zombie apocalypse, the world war z zombie is the superior choice.

If every zombie has the threat level of a 500 pound man trying to make it up the stairs for another snack cake, thats one thing.
If every zombie has the threat level of a feral orangutan with motive that feels no pain... I think that changes things significantly

[SiuiS]

One thing to consider is that this is one of those cases where we've got the same word meaning different things. Radiation from a microwave is different than radiation from something that is radioactive, and radiation poisoning is excessive exposure to radioactive particles.

I actually think if we've got zombies that are immune to the elements they would mostly be unaffected by a microwave, but since they aren't immune to catching fire, I would think you would have to have a very strong microwave focused on them for a long period of time.

I'm not sure on radiation poisoning exactly, but the biggest problem with radiation exposure is the mutation of genes and the destruction/screwing with the natural regeneration of tissue in living bodies. Since zombies don't heal long term exposure to radiation shouldn't really do anything to them. And a quick search of radiation poisoning is the same thing as long term exposure, just enough that it starts much sooner.


That was from radiation sickness, so pretty much exactly the same thing as long term exposure. So it would seem as long as they "survive" the initial blast they should be mostly unaffected. This wouldn't be the case with other virus style zombie scenarios, but in this supernatural one it should be.

I was thinking fall out, but the thought became more general. I'm not sure if radiation has a deleterious effect on functionally-inanimate things or not.

If radiation poisoning requires metabolism that's a pretty clar answer though.

[Bulldog Psion]

Science is broken and that doesn't shake up anything at all? :smallconfused:

I have been relying on the difference between reality and perception since the start. Much like pain; the actual pain one experiences when punched is much less than the stress and fear they experience at the thought of being punched in a tense situation. People who could easily handle being punched will react as if they cannot because until it happens, they aren't certain they can handle it. It causes illogical reactions when viewed objectively.

Zombies may end up not being a threat. Where I take umbrage is the idea that all people know this immediately and no one in the world reacts poorly out of fear or superstition because of it. I'm okay with you expecting a different set of occurrences. I'm less okay with the casual dismissal of the possibility that anything could happen.

I'll try and think of RL examples for you that don't involve verboten topics. It's very frustrating to have models from reality that perfectly demonstrate, that I can't share.

[...]

That's interesting. Do you feel people can normalize and compartmentalize a clearly supernatural occurrence when it is documented and routine?

I think you're overestimating the average person's understanding of, and faith in, science. To most people, science is something that guys in lab coats do somewhere, and that gives them cars, TVs, and smartphones that they have no idea how it works.

If they don't understand it anyway, it can't be "broken" for them by zombies. It's just another weird phenomenon in a world full of weird phenomena that they already just accept on a daily basis without knowing how they work.

I daresay the majority of people have some belief in the supernatural already. Whether via general religious belief, ghosts, demons, possession, haunted houses, the evil eye, what have you, I'd be willing to say that better than half the people in any given population sample of sufficient size already believe something supernatural is real.

Furthermore, there have been a ton of zombie movies. The idea of zombies isn't particularly new and startling. In a way, a zombie plague would probably be kind of familiar.

Now as for scientific types? Well, as someone interested in science, and who fancies himself a bit of a rationalist, I can only speak for myself. I can't claim that my viewpoint represents anyone else at all.

In my case, I would be scientifically interested in the zombies. They exist; therefore, there must be some process which creates them and enables their existence. While I wouldn't personally get any closer to one than I could help, and would limit my interaction to the bullet and the machete, I would certainly be fascinated by whatever new phenomenon their existence would reveal to science. They exist; therefore they are natural; therefore the natural sciences are about to expand in a fascinating, if a bit spooky, new direction.

Of course people are going to react poorly. I've already noted several times that I figure quite a few ragged homeless people would be tragically shot, run over, or otherwise disposed of by overzealous zombie hunters.

But you seem to be looking for confirmation of total societal breakdown as a result of the odd zombie here and there. I, and seemingly some others in this thread, just don't see it happening. Social structure is a human survival mechanism. Put them in a survival situation and they are unlikely to deliberately kick over the thing they themselves and people like them built to make it easier to stay alive.

The social structure might become modified, and people would be more likely to support totalitarian arrangements (assuming that those didn't try to disarm them when zombies were prowling). Then again, if the existing setup proved capable of dealing with the situation, and in the first world I think this would be the case, it might not lead to sweeping changes. Maybe establishment of a Bureau of Unrestricted Zombie Zapping (BUZZ) or something.

Like I said, if you want society to break down in a zombie story you're writing or something, just do it. If you want people's opinion on whether the appearance of a few zombies would cause humanity to suddenly implode and destroy itself, then my opinion is that no, it wouldn't.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I think you're overestimating the average person's understanding of, and faith in, science. To most people, science is something that guys in lab coats do somewhere, and that gives them cars, TVs, and smartphones that they have no idea how it works.

If they don't understand it anyway, it can't be "broken" for them by zombies. It's just another weird phenomenon in a world full of weird phenomena that they already just accept on a daily basis without knowing how they work.

A popular thread in a lot of zombie fiction is having science failing to solve the problem, either via a cure, a vaccine or some other thing. I submit this plotline exists because it's pointing out that science won't be the solution to the problem within the story. Although at this point it's reached silly cliche status, I posit it originated with a desire to subvert audience expectations.

I liked how the scientist character in Day of the Dead was all excited about a rather useless, but weird discovery. Also, when he failed to produce anything practically useful in his research, other people got fed up with him. This idea was basically his whole point of existing in the movie.
In short, science is both officially broken (in terms of our understanding), and broken in the public's view because people have an unrealistic expectation that it will provide solutions, when really all you can expect of science is an investigation process and finding (potentially) interesting things to look at.

Also, tying this post into a previous statement, investigating these magical forces with science does not guarantee that we could make use of (or keep ourselves safe from) these magical forces in any way. It's a possibility, not a guarantee. But that possibility is the reason why it's worth engaging in science in the first place.

[veti]

But you seem to be looking for confirmation of total societal breakdown as a result of the odd zombie here and there. I, and seemingly some others in this thread, just don't see it happening. Social structure is a human survival mechanism. Put them in a survival situation and they are unlikely to deliberately kick over the thing they themselves and people like them built to make it easier to stay alive.

For the most part, I agree with you. And yet... I can see a way it could go horribly downhill. It's clearest if I describe how I imagine it playing out for me, personally.

Morning. We get up, get the kids ready for daycare, and go to work. At no point do we hear any news, so nothing interferes with this routine. The first inkling of anything out of the ordinary is when we get out on the road and there's no traffic. That's odd, but not really alarming.

Arriving at work, I check the internet. But the news sites are all down - three billion people clicking "refresh" on them will do that. I might see something odd on whatever sites I do find, but most likely would ignore it. If I paid enough attention to actually read the words "dead returning to life" or similar, I'd just assume it was a publicity stunt for some crappy new movie.

A few more people arrive at work. Some of them may have heard some news, but it's crazy hard to confirm anything because the relevant bits of the internet are effectively down (and will be, most likely, for at least the rest of the day). Eventually we figure out how to get a radio or TV working, and eventually eventually we decide to take what it's saying seriously. Then I call my spouse, we need to pick up the kids and get home - not because home is magically safe, but it is important that we all be together right now.

Before being picked up, I walk to the local shops. My plan is to get some cash from the bank, and buy some supplementary food, on the basis that I don't know when it will be possible to go shopping again. Many shops are closed (because people haven't turned up for work today), but there's probably a bakery open - I get a couple of loafs of bread, maybe some pies. On top of that, I know we've got enough food in the house to last the rest of the week, plus some emergency rations; that's reassuring if it's Monday, but not so much if it's Friday.

And it's this question of "shopping" that has the potential to destroy everything. A lot of shops are closed, or open at sharply reduced capacity (a lot of supermarket checkout operators have stayed home), and a lot of people have just simultaneously realised that they don't know how long this whatever-it-is will go on for or when things will get back to normal - so those shops that are open, are now under enormous pressure. There may not be any deliveries today, or tomorrow. The supermarkets will be a frenzied scrum on day 1, bare by day 2.

What would you do, if you couldn't buy food, and didn't know how long it would be until you could? My first thought would be to beg from family and neighbours, but if that didn't work... I'd have to say, smashing windows and taking what I needed would start to look like an increasingly attractive option. Now, as per government recommendations, we have about three days' worth of emergency food in the house; but not everyone has that, and I'd hate to be dependent on it without having some idea when it would end. The idea of those rations is for something like an earthquake or eruption, where there's an initial shock and then you just have to survive until help can get to you. But this - this is ongoing, and everywhere. Who knows when the shops will be full again?

[VincentTakeda]

Plus I think the better your neighborhood the faster it will fall. Good neighborhoods are full of entitled people and you cannot match the unmitigated fury of getting in the way of an upper middle class suv driving soccer mom who cant get her starbucks... The zombies would run from her if they know whats good for them. zombies will be the least of your problems in a rich neighborhood.

We could be kind and call them 'hard working, motivated, ruthless opportunists...'

I don't wanna be mean, but if you told a guy the only chance he had of keeping his $500,000 home is if he lit a kitty on fire... If I were a gambling man... Hate to say it... but... I wouldnt be betting on the kitties... And thats before we even talk about zombies...

Sure there are plenty of them out there that would say meh. I'll lose the house... No big deal. I built that fortune I can do it again... But they wouldnt have to if all they had to do was take this can of gas over there to that little box... Maybe I'm exaggerating.... Maybe.

[SiuiS]

I think you're overestimating the average person's understanding of, and faith in, science. To most people, science is something that guys in lab coats do somewhere, and that gives them cars, TVs, and smartphones that they have no idea how it works.

If they don't understand it anyway, it can't be "broken" for them by zombies. It's just another weird phenomenon in a world full of weird phenomena that they already just accept on a daily basis without knowing how they work.

Oh, I'm not talking about perception. Although your point that people already believe in the supernatural and so it's reveal would have little impact is interesting. I would expect at minimum a shift in societal power dynamic – every skeptic is now an idiot and every spiritual or new age or spooky person is the go-to.

Unless you know an entire neighborhood of rational and level headed people. That would be ace. Likely stable enough to fix the rest of the world from there!



Furthermore, there have been a ton of zombie movies. The idea of zombies isn't particularly new and startling. In a way, a zombie plague would probably be kind of familiar.

That's the problem though, isn't it? :smallbiggrin:
A familiar scenario. Zombies exist! Well, you've seen the movies. You know how this goes. It's time to get your zombie kit, your zombie gear, call up your friends on the phone tree and tell them which color coded zombie survival binder to reference, and hit the streets. You're savvy, you're capable and young, you'll survive this!

A number of people have zombie survival plans which include "befriend folks who look like chumps, take their stuff". And I expect these over zealous aurvival nuts will be the real deleterious force at work.


Now as for scientific types? Well, as someone interested in science, and who fancies himself a bit of a rationalist, I can only speak for myself. I can't claim that my viewpoint represents anyone else at all.

In my case, I would be scientifically interested in the zombies. They exist; therefore, there must be some process which creates them and enables their existence. While I wouldn't personally get any closer to one than I could help, and would limit my interaction to the bullet and the machete, I would certainly be fascinated by whatever new phenomenon their existence would reveal to science. They exist; therefore they are natural; therefore the natural sciences are about to expand in a fascinating, if a bit spooky, new direction.

Speaking as a tangent, this sounds like a rationalization. Consider, it means that whatever force is doing this has existed the sum of human history and has so far been scientifically undetectable, and not without interest or effort. Why would we assume that, only change being zombies, suddenly we would have a breakthrough on, like, discovering the human soul, or charting the planetary flow of chi, or detecting the subtle energies of astrology?

The answer is that the means are just as inscrutable, just as logically, scientifically bull as before... But there are still zombies. It's like reducing an equation. Sometimes the best you can do is reduce it to a smaller equation, not solve for a discrete number.



But you seem to be looking for confirmation of total societal breakdown as a result of the odd zombie here and there.

You're extrapolating incredulous ness at specific flippant responses into disagreement with a premise.

I've seen someone stabbed for a wrong number dialed on their phone.
I've seen someone almost physically assault another for not flagging down a bus.
I've seen reports of an entire county having a pervasively corrupt and morally wicked police force and naught to be done.
I've seen roving gangs of ex-military bad boys who were more interested in defending their honor from percieved slights than what actually may have happened or been said.

Any response along the lines of "nothing could possible go wrong, we solve this, business as usual" is either a failure of understanding of the human condition, or too general a generalization.

I fully agree this wouldn't be a total societal breakdown. I do think things will be much worse in the first few days than you, however, because I personally know scores of people who are terrible human beings. There's an entire four block section of town no one visits, and that police (and paramedics) do not enter without at least a vest. An area where fights will break out over patio furniture that leads to fatal shootings. This strikes me as the kind of thing that could do so much damage it makes a mess of everywhere else as well.

[Forum Explorer]

For the most part, I agree with you. And yet... I can see a way it could go horribly downhill. It's clearest if I describe how I imagine it playing out for me, personally.

Morning. We get up, get the kids ready for daycare, and go to work. At no point do we hear any news, so nothing interferes with this routine. The first inkling of anything out of the ordinary is when we get out on the road and there's no traffic. That's odd, but not really alarming.

Arriving at work, I check the internet. But the news sites are all down - three billion people clicking "refresh" on them will do that. I might see something odd on whatever sites I do find, but most likely would ignore it. If I paid enough attention to actually read the words "dead returning to life" or similar, I'd just assume it was a publicity stunt for some crappy new movie.

A few more people arrive at work. Some of them may have heard some news, but it's crazy hard to confirm anything because the relevant bits of the internet are effectively down (and will be, most likely, for at least the rest of the day). Eventually we figure out how to get a radio or TV working, and eventually eventually we decide to take what it's saying seriously. Then I call my spouse, we need to pick up the kids and get home - not because home is magically safe, but it is important that we all be together right now.


Do you listen to the radio in your car?


Also bolded for emphasis, what? What do you mean working? Are they all broken in your neighborhood or something?

Anyways for the radio? We do have really bad storms occasionally so they have emergency broadcasts. They are very distinct, and could/would be used to spread the word of where the zombies were and if it was safe to leave your home. They honestly wouldn't even say why. It would be something like 'Please stay in your home. Dangerous creatures are at such and such locations. If you are not within a safe place and are within that area, please head to the nearest police station. Avoid all individuals who are acting in a strange manner. Please stay in your home...'

Something like that would simply be playing on every radio station.

[Killer Angel]

It would be something like 'Please stay in your home. Dangerous creatures are at such and such locations. If you are not within a safe place and are within that area, please head to the nearest police station. Avoid all individuals who are acting in a strange manner. Please stay in your home...'

Something like that would simply be playing on every radio station.

Will they also play R.E.M.'s "it's the end of the world"? :smallsmile:

[veti]

Do you listen to the radio in your car?

Not usually, no.


Also bolded for emphasis, what? What do you mean working? Are they all broken in your neighborhood or something?

It's the office. Radios and TVs aren't generally used here, except on special occasions, and I for one don't know where they're kept or what to plug them in to.

[Forum Explorer]

Not usually, no.



It's the office. Radios and TVs aren't generally used here, except on special occasions, and I for one don't know where they're kept or what to plug them in to.

Huh, okay then. That'd certainly mess with things quite a bit.