Until recently people lacked knowledge of basic healthcare and food crops could not sustain large populations. That is not the case in our scenario.
Actually, no you don’t. In older times you cranked out 10 kids because only 3 or 4 of them might survive long enough. In a post-Z world, that knowledge of basic healthcare will not disappear and there will be ample room for expansion for your children. Note that historically, overpopulation is often a cause for war but in this case there will be no need for war because the expansion areas will be empty.
Not immediately, no, but we are talking of 5 years post-Z, a time period when the zombies have largely or entirely gone. A time when society will have stabilised.
Dude. Raising a baby is a lot of work. Cranking out ten kids was not the norm in the past. That sort of thing only happened in particular places during particular times. People didn’t have ten kids in the medieval era, or in the classical era. It’s not the norm.
People aren’t going to have ten kids because that’s the only way to quickly repopulate the world. That’s not how the human brain works.
Yes, a generation or two after the apocalypse, there will be plenty of empty space for humans to move into, and population growth will be rapid. Whether they’re hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers or whatever, there will be lot of room for new farms and animal populations will rebound, after 99 percent of humans are dead. That’s a situation where rapid population growth could happen.
But not five years afterward. The survivors of the apocalypse won’t be physically or emotionally or socially capable of it. You’re going to have a second population crash after the first population crash, because very few of the traumatized survivors will have the mental or emotional tools to prosper in the post-crash world, let alone raise ten kids.
The whole zombie thing ends if you just cremate, burn, everyone who dies. You don’t need to worry about destroying the brain/head that way. No double tap needed. No body and nobody is a zombie. And the whole worry about returning to a current level of civilization is a non-starter. Things will revert to tribalism for awhile and we pick up where we left off, only armed with a lot more knowledge. The recovery will take a generation or so, but no longer. Zombie movies are dependent upon continuing to deal with the zombies. They stay and fight and become more zombies, repeat.
There will be storage tanks of various things that you might need until you can make them on your own. Warehouses full of non-perishables, tanks full of various things, you just need to access them. They aren’t going away just because zombies are after you. Zombies appear to be non-materialistic, they don’t want things.
What I found missing in the post nuclear war movie, Threads, is the idea that none of the tractors and farm equipment will ever run again. Give me an empty tractor, no fuel for hundreds of miles, and I will be plowing your field before spring. Bio-Diesel is a real thing. You can run your truck or tractor off the French fry grease from McDonalds, with a little processing and filtering. I know a couple guy who do that.
What? We are out of grease? We make our own, it is very simple. All you need is something formerly alive and cook it down. Most life forms are surprisingly oily. Cook it and it separates into oil, which floats to the top, meat, and bone meal. Hydrolysis. All I need is a tank, a heat source and some dead bodies of some kind, could be cows, or salmon, and I open up Zombie Diesel and Fertilizer Supply.
I used to run what is called a reduction plant that did just that.
People act like the end to civilization would be a real bad thing. I am not convinced. And anthropogenic climate change has just been solved.
Actually, yes, many people did. The thing is, many of those children did not survive. Queen Anne had 17 pregnancies. Even in 1851 the average number of children was over 4. Remember that before the age of scientific medicine, a LOT of children died very young. From 30% to perhaps 50%.
It’s a lot easier to have 17 pregnancies if you’re the Queen. You have people looking after you while you’re pregnant, and when you give birth you hand the baby over to a team of wetnurses, nannies, tutors, chambermaids, and god knows what else.
It’s another thing to be 6 months pregnant washing the diapers of your 9 month old baby and two year old toddler in the creek out back while keeping an eye on the three year old and the four year old while the five year old tries to help.
And 1851 is well into that economic transformation that I was talking about. It was called the Industrial Revolution.
The thing is, “you have to have 8 kids so 2 can survive to adulthood” only works if it actually works. If you can’t do it, then guess what, there’s a continuing population decrease, which is what I would predict. You try to raise a kid, the kid dies. You try to raise another, the kid dies. Then your husband dies, so you get another husband. You try to have another kid, the kid dies. Then you die. There you go. There will be a secondary population crash even after the zombies are done eating everyone, because people will have to figure out ways to live and thrive. Lots won’t. Hence secondary crash.
Yes, it is physically possible for women to have large numbers of babies, and for the population to grow rapidly. It requires an economy and society that supports it. Labor saving devices, cheap manufactured goods, global trade in agricultural products, stable social structure so people can cooperate with each other. Most times and places in human history you were lucky to have 2.1 kids. 2.1 kids over thousands of years adds up to a large population increase. But the demographic transition that we went through isn’t the norm.
Please put your modern sensibilities aside and understand that this is what people did. Hell, an older friend of mine was the first of 8, and that’s post-WW2. There have been multiple Dopers who have found families with 8 or 10 or more children in their recent past. And with a modern understanding of basic healthcare, a lot more children survive. And remember that in a post-apocalypse world your children are your pension - there are no pension funds. So there will be a lot of children and a lot of them will survive and so the population will increase rapidly (absent another disaster, of course) and we’ll be back to modern population levels within a century or two.
Potentially strong social effects from widespread PTSD. Most survivors will have had repeated traumatic experiences with no real options for early treatment. Those won’t just be with the walking dead. There will be a host of traumatic events that are just related to the breakdown of society. Some of those other experiences will probably be direct combat with other fully living humans over resources for survival. It’s bound to have some effects on how we approach each other as we rebuild a social organization.
We may well see a strong gender imbalance that society has to adapt to. On the one hand, there are cultural notions of men protecting women and children that might lead to them dying in greater numbers. We’re also talking about an environment where the physical ability to perform violence and run fast are a clear survival advantage; that’s not good for women. Maybe those effects balance out. Maybe they don’t. If there’s a strong gender imbalance it might prompt some revision to the current social structure that dominates mating.
Lots of people walking around visibly armed. Aside from the risks of straggler zombies it will take a while for rule of law to reassert itself. People that have had to fight killer zombies and their fellow humans to survive are more likely to lean towards a “polite and zombie free society is a heavily armed society” than we are used to.
The problem with trying to consider the future after a The Walking Dead-style apocalypse is that the premise doesn’t hold very well, because there wouldn’t be an apocalypse.
The Walking Dead zombie rules are basically the same as the original Night of the Living Dead. Dead people reanimate (regardless of how they died), and a bite from one leads to a fatal infection. And Night of the Living Dead got it right: It was a temporary blip. I just doesn’t take very many people with rifles and pickup trucks to beat a ton of slow dumb zombies.
In order to plausibly have a zombie apocalypse, you need more formidable zombies. 28 Days Later, the Dawn of the Dead remake with fast zombies, Ringo’s bio-engineered airborne virus that turns into a thing, etc.
I would be interested in reading or seeing something set in a post-Night of the Living Dead world. One where there wasn’t an apocalypse, but where people had to be vigilant about zombies. Presumably a lot more people are armed. More people are going to die from trauma because it’s more dangerous for EMTs to intervene. Hospitals and retirement homes would look a lot more like prisons. Probably every bedroom would have a lock complicated enough that a zombie couldn’t figure it out, and everyone would lock themselves in to sleep. What else?
Also, as far as childbirth and death rates post-apocalypse, it’s true that lots of kids died in infancy in the past, but a significant amount of that can be prevented without high technology. A basic understanding of sanitation, how to purify and sterilize things, and germ theory go a long way. That knowledge doesn’t just go away even if the population shrinks by 99%.
A basic understanding of engineering goes a long way too. There are also tons of durable goods that don’t go away, that make it a lot easier to jump start an industrial society. Machinists shops are still going to exist. Electrical generators can be modified to run on available fuels. There’s a decent chance that some smaller hydroelectric plants can be brought back online, etc.
And all this stuff is written down. Even if you’ve never wired up a generator or built a smelter or whatever… if you can read and are of reasonable intelligence, you can do it.
One huge factor to add to the “reason a zombie apocalyse would fail” is the NBC suits that are standard to issue soldiers in any biological incident type situation (and are always shown to be wearing in most zombie films). They are made from reinforced nylon and completely and utterly bite resistant!
The Billy Conolly zombie comedy Fido and World War Z talk about this. Though in both cases there was an apocalypse but society has been able to recover.
As mentioned above, seriously read the book World War Z, its really good, and intelligently discusses all the stuff talked about in this thread (but don’t watch the film!)
All this discussion of childbirth, SIDS zombie and the dead rising makes me think that the risk of late pregnancy loss - AKA zombie fetus inside - would be a significant concern to would be moms.
The book is good and worth reading, but it has its share of cheez. Specifically, the bits about the blind martial artist. The rest of the book is better, but still uneven.
True, and the deification of the heroism of New York was a bit cheesey too (I assume a reaction to 9/11 which had just happened when he was writing it, I believe)
But still in terms of a realistic discussion of how society would react to a very unrealistic apocalypse (and focusing on the world as a whole rather than just the US) its pretty much unmatched.
Giving birth to a zombie would be traumatic (at least to a modern woman, I imagine post-apocalypse it would be a known possibility and hence not as bad), but I don’t see it as particularly dangerous. There is very little in this world less dangerous than a new-born human.
