Five Years Following The Zombie Apocalypse

Cafe Society
1

In the series of my earlier threads:

The effects of ‘The Snap’ from Infinity War
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=866890

and

The effects of the Independence Day fatalities
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=866339

I’ve been wondering again.

The time skip in The Walking Dead has me thinking about the downstream effects of the dead arising! Ahhh!

Anyway, five years downstream from the zombies murderizing everybody, what’s the impact on civilization. There are a couple of ways to view this.

The first is if things really fall apart as in The Walking Dead - bear in mind I know the comics much better than the TV show - in which society is down to isolated protective bands.

But really, shouldn’t five years downstream the problem be pretty much settled? Yes, according to the mythology, the dead still rise but that’s a controllable problem, isn’t it? Civilization collapsed because of the viral nature of things early on. One zombie bites three bites nine bites twenty-seven and things go off the rails. But as the population dwindles there’s fewer and fewer new zombies to be formed.

Toss in that existing zombies appear to decay at a slower rate that normal but they still decay and by the end of five years I’m thinking the concept of a ‘herd’ of zombies has to be fairly rare.

That leaves the problem really at rebuilding civilization. Five years isn’t long enough to begin repopulating 99%+ of the population. So we’re left with estimates of fewer than one million humans left worldwide. That’s not enough to maintain a technology civilization. So it’s back to steam, coal and waterwheels and an agrarian society, right? And everyone who dies gets a pickax through the brain right away.

So how long to begin rebuilding things?

Or there’s XKCD’s solution:

2

Does the zombie virus affect only humans (and maybe other apes), or is it all animal life, or somewhere in between? It’s going to be tough if we don’t have our beasts of burden.

3

If we’re using The Walking Dead as our baseline then no, animals are not zombified, only humans.

I’m going to assume that if animals were also zombified then humans would have been wiped out within a few days. Imagine little zombie mice running around.

Or Cats!

4

Which brings up a side question concerning CPR and other life saving measures. Does society now lean towards “anybody that is near death gets the pickax”, or do people still try to bring people back from the brink of death with heroics knowing that if you are unsuccessful in your CPR efforts there is a high probability your face is going to get bit?

5

I suppose the specifics depend on the “rules” of the Zombie apocalypse. Fast Zombies, vs. slow ones, are bodies rising from cemeteries or is it just the recently dead? Etc. Either way, I suspect that while the immediate aftermath would have a lot of violence and hording, after the initial horror civilization will endure. The population would be small and sustainable. There would be tons of resources for everyone. The remaining zombies would just be another natural phenomenon that people deal with like hurricanes. Knowledge would be preserved because there would be books and writings (this and disasters like it are why we must not digitize every single thing and always be printing books).

It would be awful for a long time but eventually the world would keep turning.

6

When it comes to those approaching death I think there would always be someone willing to treat the dying, even though the risk might be great. It could develop into a vocation of sorts.

And for that period just after a person dies, and needs to be dispatched, I would envision rituals developing to deal with that, a prayer or invocation asking forgiveness from the deceased for what is about to be done to their body. Even Rick, early on, didn’t want to chop that zombie up without acknowledging his hormer humanity, retrieving his wallet and reading out his name.

7

For the first few generations we will be reduced to 1700s technology simply because there won’t be enough people around. Island nations like the UK, Ireland, Japan, and Cuba will recover more quickly because they will be sealed off against further infection by the sea. If we assume that only 1% of humanity is left and each couple has six children (out of perhaps 8-10) who survive to reproduce, that’s a tripling of population every 20-25 years, so we’d only need three or four generations to get a population sufficient to support a modern society. Call it a century, plus or minus.

8

Mmm. Might be worse than that. I’ve seen projections around the web of less than a million humans remaining on Earth by season six of The Walking Dead. Given those numbers I’d assume a lot of the island nations would be completely depopulated.

That that opens opportunities for survivors. Fall back to Catalina off LA. Or the barrier islands off North Carolina. Anyplace that’s sort of defensible and can be cleared of zombies and try to reestablish things that way. Then ride it out and move back onto the mainland.

9

So that’s 0.01% (roughly). That means there are still 6500 people in the UK. That’s a breeding population, if they can get together (and we’ve discussed that elsewhere; ironically, this is easier in the UK than in America). And the zombies will have culled the halt, the lame, the elderly, and the ill, so those 6500 will be fit and healthy. Assuming the same rate of population increase, you only need 7 or 8 generations to get back to modern population levels. In the longer term it’s actually no big deal.

10

I’m given to understand (I didn’t read the books or see the film) that World War Z better addresses long-term zombie tactics. Adapting the military and police to go more for head-shots, preparing the human defenses for zombies to arrive by walking across the Atlantic Ocean floor, etc.

11

Yes, it does. And features Michael Stipe!

Only the book, though. The movie, while good, doesn’t hold a candle to WWZ the book.

12

Given the nature of the survivors that we saw on TWD, only stupid people survived. Nobody learns from either their successes or their mistakes. Further, a largish proportion of the stupid people who survived are also evil and/or crazy. Regardless of what happens with the walkers, I honestly believe that, in that universe, humanity dies out because the survivors are unable to rebuild society due to the shortcomings mentioned above.

13

Also, do zombies need food? If so, does it need to be humans, or can they survive on the same foods living humans eat? If they need to eat humans, then any small, isolated area will quickly become safe, one way or the other.

14

In the show, we saw walkers devour a horse.

15

If I understand the basics of the zombie outbreak in “The Walking Dead” it’s that :

[SPOILER]1) People who die come back as bloodthirsty zombies (like Shane) that shamble along rather slowly and “die” when the suffer trauma to their brain.

  1. When the zombies bite someone, that bite leads to an infection that ultimately kills the bite recipient.[/SPOILER]

I just don’t see that snowballing into something uncontrollable that wipes out 99% of the population. Large “herds” of zombies were held at bay by standard chain-link fences at times. Something with sturdier walls would be basically impenetrable. It wouldn’t be that hard for governments / the military to set up lots of safe zones where people could evacuate to and send out patrols to wipe out the walkers. A platoon of soldiers could probably wipe out thousands of walkers with virtually no casualties, if they exercised some basic tactical competence and arranged good fields of fire.

16

Emphasis added:

You and I remember that movie very differently.

17

If population was reduced to ~1% at Z+5 years, the relict environment would have an interesting mix of things you could use.

Canned / preserved foods - probably a lot is still viable, but also lot would be starting to expire, if it was not already looted or lost. Does botulism become a bigger killer than zombies?

Water - unless you had a good natural ground supply, wherever you were settled you’d have to seriously manage water capture and storage.

Petrol - I gather that it goes off within a few years at most so lets say most of it is gone. The various rubber bits and oils on engines probably perish as well making any mechanical power without a competent mechanic in attendance unfeasible. Post-apocalyptic motorcycle desperadoes are probably not too much of a concern unless you own an oil refinery in the desert.

Houses - pick your mansion, in fact, pick a streetful. Shelter is one thing that should be abundant and in reasonable shape, along with clothing and bedding. Could you rig up water tanks to every house near you so they become passive collectors? Need to balance clustering for protection vs land for farming, but chain-link fencing will be abundant.

Electronics, electronic data, batteries - become wistful stories told by old people. Maybe some harnessing and recycling of solar plant could work, but say goodbye to the Cloud and all your memories, and most likely capacity to do anything beyond mental arithmetic or long division with pencil and paper.

Communication - pedal operated ham radios and tin cans with string may be all that’s left. That means communicating further than the next group will be a big problem, and the capacity to create any sort of collective action or consensus effectively zero without sending missionaries or Postmen.

Skills in the population - will there be sufficient literacy in the coming generations to access any knowledge in books. You may have a doctor, vet, mechanic, agronomist, nurse, teacher and so on now, but when they go, can anyone read and understand Knee Operations for Dummies?

Civil institutions - I’ve grown to believe that Walking Dead [TV series] is crap and unwatchable, but it does have an interesting meta-theme about different types of society and how they fare under pressure, and how morality is recreated from first principles. How do you decide what sort of society you will be and how do you ensure it stays that way beyond the tenure of a charismatic hyper-violent man-child?

Population growth - having people fucking when there is no longer TV or internet seems to be the least of your worries. Plus the maximum shelf life for condoms is five years.

Overall I think Z+5 is a critical point for civilisation. The threat should be contained or at least stable, there will never be more people who have actual training and knowledge still around, and there is hopefully enough scavengeable stuff in the landscape to support an expansive re-civilising program.

If you leave it for another five years you’ll have lost more of your knowledge and skills, may not have taught kids to read or understand things from books and watched useful things around you start to rot.

18

If anyone dead automatically comes back as a zombie it would be risky to sleep next to your partner, especially the older you get. If you have a newborn, how would make sure it’s still alive in the morning and not a zombie that died of SIDS during the night?

19

Which movie are you referring to? I thought we were discussing the AMC TV show The Walking Dead:

20

It was the one whose title I bolded in the spoiler.

:smiley: