Most (but not all) works of fiction featuring zombies presume that the plague will overrun society, resulting in a handful of post-apocalyptic survivors outnumbered by the zombies thousands to one. But I’m not sure that would be the case. Even allowing that zombie bites are 100% infectious and that everyone who dies for any reason becomes a zombie, I don’t see that it would necessarily become a runaway exponential increase. I would suppose that steps against the zombie threat would be undertaken long before the point of social collapse.
You are correct. Zombies are humans, but worse. Even if zombies are capable of beating humans when they outnumber the humans thousands-to-one, the only way they are capable of reaching that numerical advantage is if a 99.9% infectious and deadly disease does all the heavy lifting.
The black death had a death rate of 30-50% and that was just mother nature. In zombie stories, the cause is often a military bio-weapon or medical experiment gone wrong, so I don’t see why an even higher rate would be out of the question.
I don’t know if this even exists, or what it would be called, where unlike most other people you’re immune to casual contact with a disease (water, food, air) but succumb to it if you’re injected with a higher dose, i.e. a bite.
Sometimes there’s some serious fridge logic, like in the Resident Evil 2 game where it’s spread by infected mice and fleas. The entire city falls pretty much instantly. So the living characters never get bit by a flea? Even when they’re going through dog kennels and animal labs?
I think the only spread by bite scenario I found halfway believable was the 28 Days Later franchise, since it takes like 5 seconds, they’re fast, they projectile vomit blood onto your face, and they don’t waste time consuming their victims. In a lot of other media it takes awhile to zombify and zombies gather around and eat people like they’re lions eating a zebra on the Serengeti. There wouldn’t be anything left to shamble about!
If we’re talking about your classic Romero zombie I would tend to agree. They demonstrate very little ability to engage in complex thinking precluding the formation of strategies, possess only the most rudimentary ability to use tools,* exhibit no sense of self-preservation, and demonstrate very little ability to learn. (Some of this changed in Land of the Dead) The biggest short term threats caused by Romero zombies might be a disruption in normal economic services which may result in shortages of food and fuel but the long term outlook for humanity looks pretty good. In the long term we’d need to have different funerary rites.
*A lot of people forget that in the original Night of the Living Dead we see a zombie pick up a rock in an attempt to break a car window and we see a child zombie use a trowel to stab her mother to death.
I think we only saw that once - zombie blood-barfs on someone, then moves on to seek other victims - the rest of the time, rage-zombies would tear a person to pieces.
Heck, in 28 Weeks Later (one of the most colossally and infuriatingly stupid movies ever, I thought), Robert Carlyle gets infected by his asymptomatic-carrier wife and immediately gouges her eyes out in blind (heh) fury. He then somehow manages to escape the locked room they’re in and, well… penis ensues.
I hadn’t considered that possibility: a contagious deadly disease kills people and then they turn into zombies. But then you have to ask why the few survivors didn’t, what the vector of the plague was, etc.
Zombies will never run out of replacements no matter how many are destroyed until normal humans are all wiped out. It’s hard to deal with that sort of advantage, regardless of what the ratio is at any given moment…
See, *now *we would have it all down quickly, because we’ve seen so many zombie movies.
In Night of the Living Dead, nobody knew what the hell was going on. Barbara’s brother Johnny died without ever knowing he was being attacked by a zombie.
There’s even hints (and even without hints, it’s entirely probable this would happen) some people were killing living people they thought were zombies.
The confusion component would be enormous.
Wrong. To maintain their numbers, for every zombie that dies, the zombies have to infect and convert a human that is smarter than they are, faster than they are, more agile than they are and more heavily armed than they are. If the zombies manage to infect one person but two zombies die in the process, the zombies lose.
Yes… but if one zombie can infect a few people before going down, we have a heck of a vector, assuming 100% lethality, and particularly if it can kill victims relatively quickly. And that’s not even considering the power of zombies in groups.
The zombies have some natural advantages too. They won’t panic, they don’t need to eat, they don’t need rest, they won’t have a psychological breakdown, they can’t be hurt or intimidated, and they’re very difficult to kill.
Not necessarily true. In some zombie shows, literally everyone becomes a zombie when they die, even if they just died of natural causes.
We’ve done this a few times on the Dope…my opinion continues to be that a zombie outbreak will be easily repulsed once humans are aware of the threat. It’s easy to tell a human from a zombie, and the latter behave very predictably. You can even set up traps that passively collect zombies, and such trapping would be far easier than with most animals.
So the peak zombie population depends on how many people get converted in the first few hours of confusion. This would depend on various parameters, but I’d go with a modest estimate; those people indoors will barricade themselves when they see people going crazy outside. And many of those people outside will quickly retreat inside.
And once inside, most people will be quite safe; movies often have to contrive some reason why a given family is unsafe inside.
It wasn’t hinted that; that’s exactly what happened to happened to Ben in the original Night. By Day we find out humans are outnumbered 400K to one. Granted the scientist who came up with those figures was insane and had no way of verifying them.
More than once, I found myself thinking of the monk in *Ladyhawke:
*
“Walk on the LEFT HAND SIDE!”
You have to admit, that’d be an awesome trick to eliminate zombies.
Here’s a cool zombie simulator based on a US census population model. I set it to approximate Rage Virus - very low kill to bite ratio (zombies bite and the victim immediately turns) and short time for a zombie to travel one mile (i.e. zombies are runners), and plunked a single zombie into New York City. It’s amazing how fast it spreads - NYC is completely zombified within an hour or two. Within a day the infection covers a good chunk of the Eastern USA.
Based on this, I don’t think a Rage Virus scenario is containable.
Based on that, sure. But I would dispute that model.
Like I say, at any time many people are indoors. When such people see random violence happening in the street*, many will just shut themselves away. There, they only need to survive for a few days for there to be sufficient time for government(s) to become aware of the threat and do the simple (compared to regular warfare) task of mopping up the zombies.
- It’s actually a good thing that most people won’t immediately realize it’s the zombie apocalypse. Crazy violence on streets surrounding my house = shut myself away, zombie apocalypse = try to make sure spouse, family are all safe, wherever they are.
I had a few thoughts – things to consider (I don’t have an actual answer, though).
There are a few problems with a zombie-spread illness (sorry: I’m going to diverge a bit from the movie mythology by throwing a bit of reality into it):
- Zombies, like all mobile creatures, require energy. Brains have the real drawback of being sealed under a hard bony skull, so let’s say that brains are their preferred food, but they can ‘survive’ off of living flesh. And it would HAVE to be living flesh, since otherwise, zombies would devour each other, which would cause a rather extreme drop in zombie population.
- OK, I can already hear people screaming 'but maybe the zombies can get energy from sunlight!" So maybe zombies develop chlorophyl. You have ‘green’ solar-powered zombies that can go for days without eating. Still… if that’s all they are powered by, they aren’t going to be able to be all that active (ever watch a wandering tree, or grass at play?) Without living flesh, they aren’t going to get very far.
- Zombie teeth are, essentially, human teeth, and zombie jaws are, essentially, human jaws. At BEST they will have the biting strength of an actual human, with the intelligence slightly better than that of a plant. Forget about wearing body armor, denim should be good enough to stop them from breaking the skin. And remember that zombie flesh is dead, meaning that they are always decaying, never healing. You are never going to get new muscles forming or zombies getting stronger from doing weight-lifting or aerobics. No, instead, they are going to continually get weaker with time, as flesh falls off, muscles atrophy, etc. And exposure to the elements is only going to make that process go faster.
In order for a zombie disease to really spread and go places, it would have to have to be spread by something other than zombies. TWD made the disease air-born, which makes some sense. Alternatively, it could transmit from human to human through some other mechanism, and might have to have a long incubation period, so that it doesn’t kill the host before they get on a plane and travel overseas.
Anyway, if this is the case, then you’ve reduced the problem to a more mundane one of figuring out who’s infected before they become zombies. Because it’s more likely to be the disease that kills you than the zombies themselves.
I love the beginning of Shaun of the Dead where it takes him days to realize something’s going on. That would be me.