In all of our various threads on zombie apocalypse, did we ever determine if you could just hunker down and outlive them?
If there were no more free range brains wandering around, and a select few of us were bunkered into say a missile silo with a couple years of supplies and fuel for the generators could we wait until they all starved to death or would we have to shoot and burn all the zombies?
If by zombies you mean the Romero type, then no - they don’t starve, they’re dead. Over time they’ll “wear out”, as their bodies do not repair.
As for the types in 28 Days Later or in Zombieland, yes - they’re actually alive. They’ll starve at some point.
If it’s a Romero style zombie, it would be a very, very long wait.
Great question for Christmas Day!
The bigger issue is entropy-more specifically, energy intake. Zombies are often portrayed as perpetual motion machines, because they have no visible means of energy intake (nor, I would posit, any means of energy conversion if their bodies no longer have the requisite mechanisms to process food-be it brains or whatever). If they can get energy by eating meat, then there will be strong competition between them for whatever scarce morsels they can find, and those that don’t get sustenance (or can’t) should eventually fall over and die for good. Which of course leaves zombie cannibalism as the only other alternative-but they’ve never been shown eating each other, for whatever reasons (other than meta-dramatic of course).
“Magical” Zombies are just low-grade undead, and like all undead, they last forever. Even the rare undead that require sustainance, like vampires, generally go into hibernation rather than starve.
Ten to fifeteen years according to crazy old Doc Logan (& that’s in Florida’s climate). Whatever’s causing the dead to rise also drastically slows their rate of decomposition. For Max Brook’s zombies (Zombie Survival Guide & World War Z) this is because every lifeform (except humans) from buzzards to bacteria will instictively avoid zombies. I don’t remember him going into much detail about what happens to zombies in really hot and dry enviroments like deserts though.
The idea came to me to ask the question because Diary [the last Romero zombie movie]was on this morning, and we had been reading a webpage that had a missile silo for sale, so we were wondering how long you would have to hunker down until you were safe. We figured that 8 to 10 people could have enough supplies in the largest missile silo for about 18 months if it was fully stocked and bunkered, and it was already changed over to LCD lighting and whatever energy efficiency steps one could take.
I suppose one could stock up a hella amount of ammo, sniper guns and spend the boring time in a surface bunker plinking zombies for fun when not hanging out down in the silo. As long as you don’t risk any sort of physical contact with the bodies, and the zombies can’t get to the armored bunker [and it could be seriously buttoned up and made impervious when not interested in shooting.]
Mummification, basically. They last nearly forever that way, to his thinking.
Brooks presents his zombies as science based (as opposed to magic-based) but he doesn’t think it out very well. His zombies don’t require sustenance of any kind, including oxygen. At that point, his zombies are necessarily animated entirely through anaerobic metabolic processes, which should result in the zombie’s muscles consuming themselves and thereby withering fairly quickly. Even the zombies in 28 Days Later are more scientific than Brooks’s zombies.
zombie lifespan is an oxymoron
ok, so I got nothing
I recently reread World War Z and Brooks made it clear that you could outlast zombies. It was in the chapter about the Honolulu conference - humans had established safe zones and were debating what to do next. The main faction argued we should do nothing - we should stay in the safe zones until the zombies decayed enough to no longer be a threat even though this was expected to take years. (Although in the book, a more active faction that wanted to take the offense into zombie territory eventually won the vote.)
Zombies exist to serve the needs of a story.
I think a more reasonable question is: how long can humans hunker down? The purpose of zombies is to give us a glance into the life of a gazelle, or perhaps the life of some foreigner of a nationality that the Yanks don’t like very much. We can either overcome the zombies, or redesign our lives around a continuous fight for survival. The second case isn’t very interesting; we have already survived lions and tigers, and ice ages trying to kill us, and in those cases we overcame. In the second case, the zombies can live forever, or are continuously regenerated, so that we may - vicariously - observe life below that of the apex predator. In this case, the life span of the zombies doesn’t matter because we are continuously fighting the zombies.
So, the first case. The Swiss have designed their nuclear bunkers to be useful for “several months”; this is odd for the Swiss. From the Swiss I would have expected a duration in terms of hours, perhaps with a table that take into account prevailing weather conditions. However, the Swiss expect that people will be able to recover from an apocalypse, after being cooped up in a bunker for “several months”. From this argument to authority, zombies must die around about “several months”. The zombies could perhaps live a little bit longer to give the narrative a little more conflict, but the Swiss either think it is too expensive to survive more than a few months in a bunker, or that having spend a few months in a bunker that the survivors would not be able to recolonize the world. Since the Swiss think society is recoverable after “several months” as opposed to “a few years” one can conclude that zombies will need to have a life span of a few months in order to give a story about the stresses of captivity and later of the reconstruction of civilization.
In conclusion, there are two major types of zombie stories. The first type is about the grand struggle, a change for humans to again prove our right take our place under the sun. There are no rights save for those we take for ourselves, and so the first type of story requires the continuous presence of zombies as we take our world by force. These stories are often interesting because they tell the story of testosterone and of sacrifice. The second type of story tells us of the psychological stresses of isolation. The second type of story is more usually about a cold war nuclear holocaust; however, as far as I’m concerned, Zombies are just another McGuffin that keeps humans confined for a time. In summation, zombies can live as long as they need to live: either indefinitely, or for a few months.
Do zombies poop?
Do you mean real zombies, or fictional zombies?
OK, OK, I still got nothing.
You’ll be here all night? 
Tip the fish, try the waitress.
Actually, I’ve pulling a nightshift in the ER, so, yeah, I’ll be here all night.