In an attempt to ruin my weekend plans, the dead start rising from the earth. News reports are saying that every “ambulatory” dead person is now showing signs of life… and a craving for brainz. Within 24 hours, every deceased human is now a shambling, groaning wreck, causing much chaos and traffic delays… shit, I wonder if the smell of some grilled steaks will cause them to center on my house.
Like I said - my weekend is well and truly shot. Dammit!
But, seriously* - how many dead people are arising from their graves? Isn’t there an upper limit on this number based on the following attributes:
… Decomposition - how fast does a body rot to the point of uselessness, anyway?
… Inability to get out of your coffin
… Deaths where the head/brain was severed/damaged
… Deaths where the person was not mobile in the first place (eg, a person dying because of severe spinal cord injuries, or a spina bifida patient, or even dead infants?)
… Etc
Watching “Diary of the Dead”, one of the characters (or somebody on “TV”) said there weren’t enough bullets to kill all the dead. But I can’t imagine a plausible scenario where that is even possible - at least here in Texas, that is.
Anybody want to take a stab at this? How many people are really rising from the dead during the Zombiepocalypse?
*As serious in a question about zombies as serious could be.
I was going to put this in Cafe Society, then realized I was actually asking a question about statistics, so here you go. Mods feel free to move if you feel it’s appropriate (like you need my permission, anyway ).
I know we’ve had discussions about this before (yes, usually in CS). The usual handwave is that scavengers like insects, vultures, and even bacteria will avoid feasting on zombies (tho why zombie maggots, vultures, and bacteria would still defer is left unexplored and unanswered)-even then you still have to contend with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (where are they getting the energy to constantly lurch around?). In our universe at least the best option would appear to be to wait around until they all fall apart.
As for your specific question, a good chunk of them are living people who have been infected and assimilated (like the cute cheerleader zombie), not the already dead trapped in their coffins.
According to this site, within anywhere from about 2 months to a year or two you will have a bare skeleton. Of course this will vary greatly depending on how and where the body is interred.
So it would seem that for the most part the zombies will only be the relatively recently dead. Given a crude death rate for the whole world of 8.37 per 1000 per year (as of 2009) and a world population of 7 billion, we’d be looking at roughly 59 million corpses. Of those, a significant percentage will be the very young and the very old, which could account for upwards of 50% of all deaths. Also, we’d need to subtract the number of people who have been cremated, which is a difficult number to nail down, but let’s WAG and call it 10%. That gives us about 24 million zombies in prime brain-seeking condition.
That’s a relatively tiny number. Even if it were the full 59 million, an organized modern military like that of the US could easily stomp them back into the ground in short order.
Of course, the fact that these zombies would be aggressively (if slowly) chomping down on the living and adding to their numbers complicates things, but as far as the already-dead rising from their graves, it would be a relatively small number.
I found on another site that approx. 150k people die per day, worldwide. Not being an expert on this, I would assume that decomposition would effectively render any corpse incapable of shuffling w/in 3 months - once the muscles detach from the bones, what could make a zombie walk?
So I think we’re realistically looking at a 3-month supply of zombies, which translates to ~14 million brainiacs.
Thinking globally and acting locally, however, my county (Bexar County, TX (San Antonio)) suffers ~10k deaths/year (30/day). I don’t know - I think the good 'ol boy contingent alone can bag 2,500 zombies w/o help from the military/police.
The vast majority of people who die on a normal day are the very old and the very young. Zombies movies are somehow full of dead shamblers who are younger, buffer, and faster than I am and so are about a zillion times out of proportion to the actual recent dead. And let’s not forget that nearly half the dead today are cremated in the U.S. and that’s trending toward 100% in Japan.
I go with ghosts instead. You can make up any rules you like for ghosts and you have the history of the world to play with. Zombies are utterly hopeless to backfit into reality.
To be fair, the zombies in their prime of life are just a Hollywoodism - like high school teens being played by older actors who somehow never have a pimple unless it’s a plot point. We all know that real zombie hordes are more diverse.
Ultimately, we have to decide what kind of zombies we’re talking about.
If it’s really the dead rising from the grave, then the numbers are pretty low. The SSA provides probably the best table showing the odds of death at any given age: Actuarial Life Table (this was in 2007). Except the for the <1 group, children are all less than 0.01% chance of dying per year (until 18) and then it seems to hold steady at 0.15% chance until about 39. This definitely gives you the idea that your horde is mostly going to be over 60 (when the chance finally rises above 1% per year). Others have done a good job of looking at the numbers, and we’re definitely not going to see unstoppable hordes except in isolated cases (like the caretaker of a graveyard).
But if the horde is a result of infection, then it’s going to hit the population more or less evenly across age ranges, and the only limit to your horde is how quickly the virus works and on what percentage of the population. Hundreds of millions of zombies are certainly possible in this kind of scenario.
Still, the argument that there aren’t enough bullets is silly. 40%+ of US households have a gun (and this is 60%+ in some states), so we only need 2.5 bullets per gun owner (1.5 bullets in Texas) to be able to kill all of the zombies. Does anyone know a gun owner who has only 2 bullets?
(Now, yes, in a zombie apocalypse, you might have trouble finding all of these bullets, but with hundreds of times more bullets than necessary, you only have to find a small percentage of them.)
This one has always bugged me too; there simply aren’t that many non-decomposed dead bodies out there and the zombie movie trope is vast armies of the undead against a few remaining living survivors. Often times taking place in a mall. This is one thing that the original zombie classic movie Night of the Living Dead got right, it was literally the night of the living dead. The movie ends with the zombies being mopped up the next morning.
Exactly. Even assuming the dead magically come back to life, we’re talking about the very recent dead - people who haven’t been buried or cremated yet. So, say, 2 weeks worth of dead people - worldwide, that’s 2 million people, here in San Antonio we’re talking less than 500 moaners.
Any idea how a zombie gets out of a coffin? Is that even addressed in the, er, literature?
I always assumed that the scenario was playing out like this: Very old or very young dead person starts shambling; clueless person of average age thinks the zombie is a sick human (why wouldn’t you?), and goes to render aid. Gets bitten, dies, turns. Repeat a few hundred times (likely, in a large enough area), and now you’ve likely got a lot more average-age folks turned into shamblers.
Oof, this brings up the other huge flaw in zombie logic. Zombies are mindlessly motivated to eat the flesh of the living. Why do they decide to only take a nibble, or at least leave enough of a victim uneaten for them to turn into a new zombie? Even worse is that zombies are often specifically motivated to eat braaaiiinnnsss, but the only way to kill a zombie is to shoot them in the brain. How are zombies creating more of their kind if they are eating the one thing that will kill a zombie?
For the record I truly enjoy zombie movies for what they are, but they have gaping holes in their logic.
What about a movie like 28 Days Later, where “zombies” are just victims of a rabies-like virus? I thought that was much more plausible than the “rising from the grave” version.
Although, IIRC, even in the original zombie movie Night of the Living Dead the only rise-from-the-grave type zombie wasn’t yet buried-- every other zombie in the movie is created by the few unburied “starter zombies”. So it’s 99.5% zombies-who-died-in-the-last-few-hours and only like 0.5% zombies-who-rose-from-a-grave.
Edit: oh and in Dawn of the Dead, the first zombies rise in a hospital. So it looks like writers of these movies think about that detail, and I think it’s safe to say in most zombie movies the majority of zombies wandering around are ones who died only a few hours previously and were never buried.
Naw…modern embalming is only good for a few weeks at most. That’s all it’s designed for…just long enough to allow a viewing. Sealed coffins probably aids liquefaction and decomposition, even if it keeps the critters from munching on the corpse.
True, in certain circumstances you are going to get bodies that are remarkably preserved, but from what I recall the majority are going to be basically jelly after a few months. Pretty gross really…which is why I’ve designated cremation for myself when I shuffle off this mortal coil.
I think that most zombies in the books I’ve read don’t really come from the ranks of the buried dead, but more from infection of the zombie virus or disease or whatever. Folks catch the disease or virus, then they turn, then they bite someone…rinse and repeat. In a lot of the books the virus itself slows down decomposition, allowing the zombie to be mobile longer, unless it is in something like a tropical rain forest or something like that…and cold can keep them going for even longer periods of time. Usually they are internally consistent, logically, as long as you buy into the initial premise that such a virus could exist and cause people to turn into the walking dead.
The living still have the power to run away and hide after being nibbled, in short time dying, or simply zombifying in some process similar to sublimation. Zombies are limited to shuffling and don’t tend to pursue very far. The ranks swell rapidly this way. The noobs are generally in better shape than the decomposing first wave and the ranks swell with even greater rapidity.
It’s not the rising dead initially that you worry about. Most people don’t initially think to put two in the head of someone they see shuffling around. They go up to them and make sure they are okay. That’s when that undead bites 5 people and then they each bite 5 more people, and within 24 hours, your 2 million risen dead multiply into hundreds of millions.
This is taking us into the issue of microbiology, “diseases do/do not act like that”, etc, which is a bit out of scope for this thread. But, yes, in zombie literature, the exponential effect of the disease is always what gets mankind in the end.
Last time I checked, in literature (written, film, animation, etc.) is the only place that zombies exist. Not certain a factual answer can really be achieved, as authors can tailor the settings, the circumstances of the fictional disease to fit their desired results.
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