Dealing with zombies

[BurnedOut]

Is not dealing with zombies in a hypothetical situation quite easy?

Reanimation is simply cartoonish and let us leave that out. So we got the normal zombies who are aggressive and animalistic. But my question is would an hour of growling, screaming, shouting and fighting with other zombies and getting annoyed with the environment exhausting? Lactic acid would permadamage their muscles with so much strain and hence they will be less effectiveness within a matter of few hours. What about dehydration and hunger? To make them more realistic, they need to have sentience enough to properly identify foodstuffs and liquids and furthermore take them and also excrete. However a zombie should then retain its memory about what is food and what is water which effectively makes them less zombies and simply animals.

Furthermore if zombies don't have any rationality, they surely cannot survive too long by overeating flesh or choking on it. There will be too many digestive problems with that. However on the flip side if they know they know what food is, they are unlikely to engage in any kind of cannibalism because it will cost them too much energy and even if they do that out of zombie rage, they will be first to perish.

So is surviving a zombie apocalypse as easy as sitting in your house for just a full day and then dealing with the weakened or dead idiots?

 

[birdsnestfern]

Zombies just want to have fun too.

 

[Black Rose]

a zombie should then retain its memory about what is food and what is water which effectively makes them less zombies and simply animals.

Yes, a realistic zombie is just an animal.

I Am Legend (film) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Cognisant]

Well there's the supernatural zombie which is a literal corpse animated by some malign force, in which case destroying the head has nothing to do with the brain but rather breaking the spell which evidently requires a zombie to be ostensibly human. Indeed it's not so much the head but rather the face and the eyes or just something that can be interpreted as an "eye" like a skeleton staring at you with empty skull sockets, there's no actual eyes but that doesn't matter, it's performative.

In magic perception is reality, if you perceive the zombie to be capable of looking at you with its lifeless eyes and walking towards you with its limp dead legs then that's exactly what it will do regardless of how illogical it may be. If magic were constrained by the fetters of reason, then it wouldn't be magic, would it?

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The realistic zombie isn't a corpse but rather someone afflicted with a disease that is slowly killing them, turning them insane and making them a highly infectious threat to those around them. Rabies is the most obvious example but there's also prion diseases such as the infamous Chronic Wasting Disease afflicting deer.


The terrifying thing about prion diseases is that symptoms can take a long time to develop meaning the infected person could spend years spreading their disease without showing any apparent symptoms until their death is imminent.

Imagine one day people around you start going randomly violently insane, you do your best to defend yourself and take shelter with the other sane people, then some of those people turn violently insane. You think it must be transmitted by bites or scratches, but where did it come from, who was the first infected, it seems to be appearing spontaneously everywhere, even people who have no apparent injuries are suddenly turning.

The truth is they were infected years ago, as were you.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Full honesty I like zombie comedies, but I never really gotten the concept either.
I can get into vampires. It kind of makes more sense. Vampires are kind of like zombies. But more probable.
Then again from medical perspective monsters don't make sense.
Well unless we go into nature and think of natural creatures.
@Cognisant Isn't prion disease where people eat brains? That kind of does sound like zombie stuff.

 

[sushi]

develop or vaccine or move to outerspace

move to less densely populated areas like new zeland.

stack up food or gun amunition supplies.

 

[Cognisant]

@Cognisant Isn't prion disease where people eat brains? That kind of does sound like zombie stuff.

Some Pacific Island tribes would cannibalise their dead relatives which makes prion diseases increasingly probable with each new generation.

 

[Drvladivostok]

If you assume zombies have some supernatural power to regenerate their power, not use carbohydrate for energy, and don't even starve. They'd still be dead within 2-3 months thanks to post mortem melting their muscles and brain into a dark sludge.

The best method to deal with Zombie apocalypse is by boat, just wait and have a stable population to feed through fishing, and wait for 1 year, since most zombie have a shelf life of 1 month in a trropical climate, and maybe 1 year in the cooler climate, after the epidemic reach a peak its gonna plateau, Government is not gonna colapse ala' the Walking Dead, just sit it out.

When the first news of Zombies start appearing, start looking for a boat.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Some Pacific Island tribes would cannibalise their dead relatives which makes prion diseases increasingly probable with each new generation.

eeeewwww

 

[BurnedOut]

so sadly as realistic as zombie fiction wants to seem, it is more sci-fi than even iron fucking man

 

[ZenRaiden]

so sadly as realistic as zombie fiction wants to seem, it is more sci-fi than even iron fucking man

Its not sci fi. Its fi.
Sci fi has been so diluted that anyone holding a laser gun and shooting a 3 headed monster becomes sci fi.
The sci part almost does not exist in sci fi today.

 

[birdsnestfern]

Wait, I think its based on true life actually. There is a substance called tetrodotoxin that makes people into zombies.
This is in cultures that use voodoo. There are also new street drugs that do that.

One type of real zombie is created using pufferfish (salt water toad) toxin that Haitian priests use on their victims. This is for the purpose of turning people into their slaves. The victim will appear unconscious, and dead, and later make a full recovery. Many were buried and then recovered after being buried, so it appeared to be risen from the grave, but it was just the substance doing it.

How Zombies Work

Even if you've never seen a zombie movie, you probably know something about the walking dead. But did you know that zombies have their roots in folklore and -- according to some researchers -- in real events in Haiti?

science.howstuffworks.com

In movies.....

Many people credit George A. Romero with setting the standard for modern zombies. In the classic movie "Night of the Living Dead," Romero portrayed zombies as slow-moving, flesh-eating corpses, reanimated by radiation from a satellite returning from Venus. The radiation affected the recent, unburied dead, and the resulting zombies were invulnerable until someone destroyed their brains or separated their heads from their bodies. In "Night of the Living Dead," zombies were neither intelligent nor self-aware. They had a very limited use of tools, mostly confined to using blunt objects as cudgels. In Romero's later work, zombies became somewhat capable of thought, and in some cases self-aware. They still generally moved slowly and had minimal intelligence.

Many movies and video games have used Romero's concept of zombies. For the most part, zombies are:

• Newly dead corpses reanimated by radiation, chemicals, viruses, sorcery or acts of God
• Human, although some depictions include zombie animals
• Very strong, but not very fast or agile
• Impervious to pain and able to function after sustaining extreme physical damage
• Invulnerable to injury, except for decapitation or destruction of the brain
• Relentlessly driven to kill and eat
• Afraid of fire and bright lights

In some portrayals, zombism is contagious, and people bitten by zombies become zombies themselves. In others, people die from the bite and are reanimated by the same force that created the other zombies. In general, this continual spread of zombies leads to a zombie plague in which the undead vastly outnumber living humans.


Some recent zombie movies, like "Shaun of the Dead," adhere faithfully to the Romero zombie conventions and make frequent references to his work. Others depict faster, more intelligent zombies. Films like "28 Days Later" keep the basic structure of a zombie film but do not portray actual zombies. (In "28 Days Later," people are infected with a virus that takes effect in seconds -- they don't actually die until they eventually starve.) A few recent movies and games throw all these conventions aside, presenting zombies that move quickly and can think for themselves, much to the chagrin of zombie purists.

how to survive a zombie attack:

1. Don't panic.
2. Get away from the zombies. Most of the time, you can move faster than they can.
3. Gather food, water, an emergency radio, flashlights and weapons, and retreat to a secure location.
4. If possible, retreat to a shopping mall, general retail store or other location where you'll have easy access to food and supplies.
5. Stay away from densely populated areas, where the infestation is likely to be heaviest.
6. Barricade all entrances and stay put at all costs.
7. Don't get surrounded or backed into a corner or other enclosed space.
8. Remember that anyone bitten or killed by a zombie will become a threat to you and your party.
9. Wait patiently for rescue and make long-term preparations for your survival.

Also, avoid common mistakes like:

• Sheltering in a vehicle to which you do not have the keys
• Leaving blades, cudgels or other basic weapons out for zombies to find
• Teaching zombies how to use firearms
• Giving your only weapon to anyone who is hysterical
• Retreating to a basement or cellar without taking supplies with you
• Getting into an elevator in a building infested with zombies
• Letting personal feelings and arguments get in the way of survival

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

Vampires are kind of like zombies.

in movies, vampires represent the rich and zombies represent the poor

 

[ZenRaiden]

in movies, vampires represent the rich and zombies represent the poor

That kind of agrees. I kind of thinking now what do where-wolfs represent.

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

in movies, vampires represent the rich and zombies represent the poor

That kind of agrees. I kind of thinking now what do where-wolfs represent.

werewolves represent each person's inner struggle against our animal nature