One of many reasons that co-sleeping with newborns is frowned upon ;). In all seriousness, if the baby is in a crib, when you check on it in the morning, it is either:
sound asleep, or awake and happy or crying
yellowish skin, snapping jaws, messed up eyes, making TWD zombie growling noises.
If it’s #1, proceed as normal. If it’s #2, do not touch!
As for the sleeping partner scenario, I imagine it would be something like Amy’s death. I suppose some people will be caught by surprise and killed, but for a lot of people, there’d be adequate time to assess the situation and react before the fresh zombie killed them.
Armed militias in armored vehicles would go around finding ways to attract them, then kill them.
WW2 probably did more damage. I think people underestimate how resilient society can be. Europe survived the black plague that killed up to half the people there.
Over the course of about 50 years Russia underwent a civil war, WW1, the spanish flu, stalinist purges, stalinist famine and then WW2. Society still survived.
You’ve only got a brief window in which breeding-age females will be able to produce the next generation. If you miss that window, because everybody is still busy running or hiding, then humanity is on the downward slope.
I started getting my period at 12, I was neither the earliest nor the latest girl in my school to do so. I finally had a hysterectomy at the age of 50 [thanks PCOS, endometriosis and ovarian cancer …] so do the math - 38 years of being able to pop a kid out every other year … call it 18 possible kids, with perhaps 10 surviving [if I was in good reproductive health - not every woman has PCOS but I did demosntrate 3 times I could get pregnant though health issues preventerd me from carrying to term. Just using my length of reproductive years as an example.]
Even if you grant 20 years of reproductive life, that would be 10 kids, with 5 surviving … 20 years really isn’t a short window, and in desperation you screw any male around to get pregnant instead of the monogamy thing.
I would forsee a return to the motte and bailey settlements - the core of the medieval town, with walls around the town as well. A few people with salvaged sniper rifles on the tower would help with that pesky zombie invasion. Though with my ancient nagant 91/30 or the less ancient M1 even stuck in my wheel chair, I would turn to standing a watch on a wall and be a combat effective even if I couldn’t breed more population.
If you look at medieval Britain [ignoring the wars between invading Normans or Danes and the resident Anglo-Saxon bunch] it was actually fairly sustainable - a small fortified town with agricultural lands surrounding, people lived in the villages and went out to the fields and pastures instead of isolated farmsteads which is what we sort of had in colonial and federal America. There are actually oxen and horse farm hobbyists [friends of my parents organized the local annual meet and competition for farm teams of both horse and ox for at least 20 years I have knowledge of. My mom found it interesting because her family farm had used horse teams for the fields for her entire childhood and had for many generations. Love the Amish for using old tech =)] that have breeding stock and knowledge on using the old 1800s tech farming equipment, so plowing and harvesting could go on in almost modern amounts.
We would have the advantage of being able to recreate tech because we still have a hard copy knowledge base - you know how many university libraries are around with 10s of thousands of different reference books? If the average person who is interested in medicine and surgery can’t work with the available text books, then hundreds of years of scholarship is wasted [even in the 1800s many ‘doctors’ never went to college, they apprenticed, or bought books and sort of winged it.] We wouldn’t be able to produce many of the current antibitoics, but we could manage to reproduce sulfites and pennicillins as the processes are known. The herbs that are available to treat illnesses are known, I use colchcine - grown and used as medicine for some 4 thousand years, there is foxglove for digitalis, jimson weed for scopalamine, deadly nightshade for atropine, poppies for opium … just because we use synthetics doesn’t mean we can’t use the original herbs at need …
Banksiaman, canned food will still be good centuries from now. Botulism is only an issue when the cans weren’t sealed properly in the first place.
Fresh water won’t be much more of a problem than it is currently. Settle next to a river or a lake, and make sure that you poop downstream of where you drink.
The battery in your phone might not be any good, but marine batteries will still be just fine. And there are plenty of solar-powered calculators out there, so no need for long division.
Ham radio will still work just fine for global communications. In fact, that’s why ham is given a slice of precious bandwidth: Because it’s their job to maintain communications in emergencies where everything else fails.
That assumes ideal storage. The fabled cool, dry place. Even if we assume that canned goods stored in such a place might still be edible after many years, the overwhelming majority of canned goods will be exposed to extremes of temperature as the seasons change. Much of it will also get wet as the buildings they are stored in deteriorate due to lack of maintenance and roofs begin to leak. Despite what Fallout taught us, survivors won’t be eating canned food for centuries.
In theory, a woman can have 20 or more kids if she starts pumping them out as a teenager.
In a true post zombie situation, I could see the remaining women being given IVF to increase the quantity of children they produce (lots more twins and triplets).
Humanity would recover fast. If every woman has 6 kids, population triples every generation.
The Walking Dead is one of those apocalypses where the disease itself apparently makes it near-impossible to recover from.
Specifically, the zombies appear to be functional in vast numbers years past the point that they should have starved to death. They also appear not to require an intact human body with functioning organs, other than a brain, as we see zombies still able to move with open chest cavities.
Finally, worst of all:
Everyone in TWD has the disease, it’s just a bite turns you faster. Any survivor may at random become a zombie, with or without dying. It is not known if this means that every survivor will turn into a zombie within 10-20 years, dying in a way similar to HIV.
Due to the factor above, net reproductive rates could easily become negative and human species survival is impossible.
I’d argue that with the loss of technology, maternal and child morbidity would return to where it was during the early 20th century. So 20 children is probably out when 30% of those born alive die prior to their first birthday and 15% of mothers died while pregnant. Them’s serious figures.
Toss in a lack of ability to manufacture vaccines and things get pretty hairy pretty fast.
Five years will be time enough for small survivor groups to begin seeking out nearby groups with which to ally. Economic progress is hugely accelerated by combining numbers and skills/surviving technologies. Also, the seeds for new systems of governance will be planted, this time without the Electoral College.
Read the book, it is pretty much exactly what the OP describes. Its also a really really good book. I picked it up at the airport on holiday expecting schlocky horror, turns out it is really good sci-fi. Read it in one sitting (then gave it to my brother who did the same). It takes this fantastical concept, and thinks deeply about what it would do in real life, in the process making subtle commentary about political issues in the real world. Read it in one sitting (then gave it to my brother who did the same).
The film threw out everything that made the book awesome, and replaced it will schlocky dumb horror and Brad Pitt running away from zombies.
If you think women are going to start cranking out a baby a year every year, five years after the collapse of civilization due to Zombie apocalypse, maybe you haven’t met any women? Or babies?
Yes, women in settled farming communities with room for growth have sometimes reproduced like this. But you know, it requires a lot of work to care for a goddam baby, and it’s a lot of work to be pregnant. Intentionally getting pregnant with a three month old nursing baby? When you’re living in a filthy walled village eating scavenged canned goods surrounded by zombies?
The population can only expand when there are enough surplus resources to care for the newborn children and the pregnant mothers who are cranking out those children. That’s not happening in a post-apocalyptic scenario. In a couple generations when the zombie infestation isn’t a problem anymore, and new zombies are prevented through rational funeral customs, and people have re-learned subsistence farming, and formed a new farming culture, then you might see a rapid population growth. It’s not happening with the traumatized and desperate survivors of the first generation. You’d be lucky if the second generation is half the size of the first.
John Ringo has his problems as an author, and in many ways his Black Tide Rising series isn’t any different (and that’s before the Sarah Palin expy becomes President in book four). But what we have in that series is basically a one-time population collapse (it’s a human-modified version of influenza, which is both susceptible to degradation due to mutation and a reasonably-effective vaccine developed early on), followed by slow clearing and rebuilding. Now, the important part is that the affected are still alive, but that means they can be killed in the same way as any other living human. If the zombies in the Walking Dead actually made any sense, I’d think that’d be about the same. A mixture of modern technology that still works for as long as it’s around and a reversion to older technologies that wouldn’t support a modern economy but aren’t needed for the time being. To somewhat misquote Heinlein in Tunnel in the Sky, horses can make more of themselves and tractors can’t.
Not every year, but every other year or so. Historically, this is exactly what happened. Child and adult death rates were so high that a brood of 8 or 10 children was necessary. And there were no pensions: you needed children to provide for you in your old age. And death in childbirth was not uncommon - educated women often made out wills when they found they were pregnant.
Without a modern, 20th Century or later medical system IVF doesn’t exist and forcing twins and triplets on women tends to lower lifetime reproduction rates because of the significantly greater morbidity/mortality of multiple births on both infants and their mother. Even these days, multiple births are more likely to be fatal.
…except for all the people dying-before-reproducing from things like accidents there is no longer an ER to treat, marauding gangs of living humans, face-eating zombies…
Even in modern societies without zombie hazards the replacement rate requires more on average than two children per woman.
Historically it HAS happened, in some places and times. But in most places and times population increase was small. We don’t see doubling of the population every generation throughout history, and in many times populations have crashed. In order to crank out 10 kids you have to live in a society where this is possible. You have to have enormous economic expansion, and enough of a stable socioeconomic support system. Large population increases happened in the late 1800s and 1900s because of an economic revolution that made it possible. Go back to the middle ages and you don’t see families with 10 kids, because there was only so much land that could be divided among those kids. If you’re a subsistence farmer you can’t have 10 kids because those ten kids are going to consume ten times as much food, which means you need ten times as much food production. Agricultural production can increase with more intensive cultivation, but only by so much.
A world like The Walking Dead is not a world where women can have 10 kids. It can’t happen, because there are zombies eating everyone, and psychopathic humans killing everyone. The secret of The Walking Dead is that the humans are the walking dead, not the zombies, because humanity is doomed in that universe. Of course, if every other human being is a psychopath who will betray their fellow humans for the slightest advantage, how exactly is it that human beings survived in the first place? So the Walking Dead is not a realistic show, and not because of the zombies.
You can’t crank out ten kids unless you live in a stable society that can support you as you crank out ten kids. Your mother and sisters and aunts and grandmothers have to be around to share the burden of taking care of an endless procession of babies. Was there a gigantic population explosion after the fall of the Roman Empire? After the Mongol conquests? No, rather the reverse. A population crash takes generations to recover from, because you can’t just crank out kids in the ruins, you have to rebuild society into one where cranking out kids is possible. If zombies are roaming around eating people’s faces, and megalomaniacs are roaming around enslaving everyone, you can’t have a baby every year, even if there are plenty of canned goods still on the supermarket shelves. It won’t work. It won’t happen. And it didn’t happen historically. When society can’t protect and support a pregnant woman who is also taking care of a one year old, a two year old, a three year old, and a four year old, then that woman is not going to have a baby every goddam year. It requires an enormous economic expansion to make it possible.
