How long would you survive a zombie apocalypse?

[Matt115]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

I see what you're saying. If the virus can only be transmitted by fluid exchange via a bite then, yes, I agree that a global zombie pandemic is extremely far-fetched.

Global zombie pandemic would be impossible but as long term problem ? completly possible. Let's zombie outbeak became in Paris. There is km of km of tunels under Paris. So there is high possiblity that always few zombie would " stuck" somewhere in such tunels.

 

39 minutes ago, ElDudorino said:

This philosophical discussion ignores the fact that zombie infections are magical in nature in basically all media, other than maybe 28 Days Later.

 

In The Walking Dead they play it up as a disease but you have zombies melted into the ground with nothing left but half of their head and they're still 'alive.' And decapitation stops everything below the neck but somehow the head still tries to bite you, and it never relies on any fuel from a body. That's necromancy at work. In 7 Days to Die you have crawler zombies whose bodies are almost completely destroyed and drained of blood but you can poke them and make them bleed to death. Plus you have burning zombies you can kill with fire. That's necromancy mixed with drugs.

 

In short, everything you think you know about how the disease could work will go out the window once our dark lords actually rise up and decide to rid the planet of us.

Well..... this would be possible for ... fungus. zombie ants can be "heavy" damaged but still able to walk

[Kyonshi]

On 10/16/2022 at 7:51 AM, meganoth said:

 

All successfull zombie apocalypses work wonders as a cure to practically all other diseases, maybe with the exception of nail fungus 😉

 

Oh, and I have to wonder at what time the virus mutated? It sounds like it mutated a while after being used to vaccinate a lot of the population, but then it is inexplainable why a high percentage of the virus **distributed** aka isolated over the human population all mutated the same to result in zombies.

 

Mutation is by definition a random change in the DNA of the virus, really really random. The required change must be enough base changes away to not occur immediately (in a host every single base change occurs multiple times a day) as the vaccination would be stopped immediately after the first cases of zombieness. But it must still lead to the same result in a sizable percentage of the population.

 

Just consider Covid as an example, a new mutation family like Omikron always starts from a single place and fights itself to the top by infection. It doesn't happen (to my knowledge) that the same mutation just happens everywhere in the world at the same time. 

 

Well, im not an epidemiologist nor a virologist so i cant answer those questions with exactitude  I can only rely on the comprehension i have from experts in these fields of knowledge and competence.

What i understand from the behavior of viruses is that they mutated to lengthen their life span. The goal of this organism is to infect the most hosts possible, without killing them. Which is exactly what happened with both the fictive K virus and Covid-19. One of my best friend is a (retired) biochemist and he explained it to me very well. It'll happen very rarely that a virus mutates in a more lethal form that it previously had. It always mostly goes the higher infectivity/lesser lethality route.

Now, when did the mutation occured in I Am Legend? They illustrate more the rapid global transmission that occured. Of course, usually in real life, one strain mutates first and not all of the strains carried by hosts mutate at the same time. But in the movie, they modified the measles virus into a viral vector vaccine, which is basically the original re-engineered virus replicated, see cloned, into multiple vaccines given to the initial 10009 trials. Now since this strain was the same for all of those people, since it has the same genetic background for all 10009 doses, they were all the same and if one would mutate, then the remaining 10008 would do the same. That's the issue with cloning; if you clone a patient zero with a certain defect in their genetic sequence, all other clones will suffer from this exact flaw as well.

So, i can assume those 10009 patients probably turned in various but very close occurences and got very incredibly aggressive and bit, killed and infected a lot of people in an insane amount of time.

Now in the case of the Covid-19 and resulting but foretold mutations, for all we know, this virus wasnt used and replicated in vaccines like in the movie, it just popped out from either nature of a lab and went rogue in the population. At this point, the original strain will infect people but mutations will occur at random, like you said, in relation to a host. Not everyone deals the virus the same way, some immune systems will eliminate it, some other who are weaker will harbor it and give it time to mutate, to expand its life span.

Edited October 17, 2022 by Kyonshi (see edit history)

[meganoth]

1 hour ago, theFlu said:

Oi! I think you're selling us a little short here.. rabies is also a viral infection, we just haven't gotten around to do a collab as of yet. If he agrees to chill a bit for a few days after spreading to the brain, I think we could cook up something spectacular.

 

But we banned Rabies from the forums. All safe now 😜

[theFlu]

6 minutes ago, meganoth said:

But we banned Rabies from the forums. All safe now

You may have gotten rid of Rabies, but all we really need is a single shared host... how about this random girl with rabies:

https://community.7daystodie.com/profile/62940-girlwithrabies/

 

Safe, you say ...

[meganoth]

35 minutes ago, Kyonshi said:

Well, im not an epidemiologist nor a virologist so i cant answer those questions with exactitude  I can only rely on the comprehension i have from experts in these fields of knowledge and competence.

What i understand from the behavior of viruses is that they mutated to lengthen their life span. The goal of this organism is to infect the most hosts possible, without killing them. Which is exactly what happened with both the fictive K virus and Covid-19. One of my best friend is a (retired) biochemist and he explained it to me very well. It'll happen very rarely that a virus mutates in a more lethal form that it previously had. It always mostly goes the higher infectivity/lesser lethality route.

Now, when did the mutation occured in I Am Legend? They illustrate more the rapid global transmission that occured. Of course, usually in real life, one strain mutates first and not all of the strains carried by hosts mutate at the same time. But in the movie, they modified the measles virus into a viral vector vaccine, which is basically the original re-engineered virus replicated, see cloned, into multiple vaccines given to the initial 10009 trials. Now since this strain was the same for all of those people, since it has the same genetic background for all 10009 doses, they were all the same and if one would mutate, then the remaining 10008 would do the same. That's the issue with cloning; if you clone a patient zero with a certain defect in their genetic sequence, all other clones will suffer from this exact flaw as well.

 

My knowledge is that of a layman as well but we have wikipedia to help. And clearly wikipedia tells us that mutation comes from errors while processing (copying) DNA via RNA. Errors in a chemical process that are not predetermined by the DNA (even though not completely random). So those 10008 virus-populations with exactly the same DNA in each of those humans will immediately start to change in RANDOM ways. Because the chemical process is the culprit, not the DNA.

 

Your example of a cloned patient works because you clone the defect that is already there at cloning time.

 

35 minutes ago, Kyonshi said:

So, i can assume those 10009 patients probably turned in various but very close occurences and got very incredibly aggressive and bit, killed and infected a lot of people in an insane amount of time.

Now in the case of the Covid-19 and resulting but foretold mutations, for all we know, this virus wasnt used and replicated in vaccines like in the movie, it just popped out from either nature of a lab and went rogue in the population. At this point, the original strain will infect people but mutations will occur at random, like you said, in relation to a host. Not everyone deals the virus the same way, some immune systems will eliminate it, some other who are weaker will harbor it and give it time to mutate, to expand its life span.

 

24 minutes ago, theFlu said:

You may have gotten rid of Rabies, but all we really need is a single shared host... how about this random girl with rabies:

https://community.7daystodie.com/profile/62940-girlwithrabies/

 

Safe, you say ...

 

Baah, obviously gIRLwITHraBIES already mutated.

 

 

Edited October 17, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Syphon583]

1 hour ago, ElDudorino said:

This philosophical discussion ignores the fact that zombie infections are magical in nature in basically all media, other than maybe 28 Days Later.

 

In The Walking Dead they play it up as a disease but you have zombies melted into the ground with nothing left but half of their head and they're still 'alive.' And decapitation stops everything below the neck but somehow the head still tries to bite you, and it never relies on any fuel from a body. That's necromancy at work. In 7 Days to Die you have crawler zombies whose bodies are almost completely destroyed and drained of blood but you can poke them and make them bleed to death. Plus you have burning zombies you can kill with fire. That's necromancy mixed with drugs.

 

In short, everything you think you know about how the disease could work will go out the window once our dark lords actually rise up and decide to rid the planet of us.

Referring to a discussion about surviving a zombie apocalypse as 'philosophical' is pretty bold. This is pure fantasy, and I think people know that. Any sane person who thinks about biology for a few minutes should come to a realization that a zombie apocalypse is literally impossible due to necrosis. This discussion is for fun. So of course these things are going to be ignored.

 

56 minutes ago, Matt115 said:

Well..... this would be possible for ... fungus. zombie ants can be "heavy" damaged but still able to walk

The term 'zombie ant' is quite misleading. The ant, while infected, is not dead. It's not in control of its own actions, but it is definitely not dead, and therefore, not a zombie.

 

Of course, we can debate what you define as a zombie, but in general terms, I'm pretty sure mist will agree that it is a reanimated corpse. This is why I think it's funny that people categorize '28 Days Later' as a zombie movie. Even Danny Boyle, the director, doesn't categorize it as a zombie film.

[meganoth]

13 minutes ago, Syphon583 said:

Referring to a discussion about surviving a zombie apocalypse as 'philosophical' is pretty bold. This is pure fantasy, and I think people know that. Any sane person who thinks about biology for a few minutes should come to a realization that a zombie apocalypse is literally impossible due to necrosis. This discussion is for fun. So of course these things are going to be ignored.

 

The term 'zombie ant' is quite misleading. The ant, while infected, is not dead. It's not in control of its own actions, but it is definitely not dead, and therefore, not a zombie.

 

Of course, we can debate what you define as a zombie, but in general terms, I'm pretty sure mist will agree that it is a reanimated corpse. This is why I think it's funny that people categorize '28 Days Later' as a zombie movie. Even Danny Boyle, the director, doesn't categorize it as a zombie film.

 

I on the other hand am pretty sure that most of the participants in this discussions seem to accept the "modern" vague definition of a zombie made popular by newer movies, otherwise this objection would have been launched a few pages earlier.

 

Edited October 17, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[theFlu]

54 minutes ago, Kyonshi said:

Now since this strain was the same for all of those people, since it has the same genetic background for all 10009 doses, they were all the same and if one would mutate, then the remaining 10008 would do the same.

I think you may have phrased this part poorly, as the rest of your post makes better sense - while this sounds more like quantum entanglement. But to get 10k identically mutated infections, you need to have cloned the mutated strain. Not impossible, just requires the mutation to occur early in the manufacturing, and it being a competitive version of the original - you'd likely have both the mutated strain and the original in each host, so the mutant would have to compete with the original.

[Syphon583]

26 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

I on the other hand am pretty sure that most of the participants in this discussions seem to accept the "modern" vague definition of a zombie made popular by newer movies, otherwise this objection would have been launched a few pages earlier.

 

I wasn't aware there was a new modern definition of zombies. Guess I'm getting old.

[Maharin]

For me this discussion was never about zombie lore (at least my parts of it ).  Zombie lore is, almost completely, unrealistic and extremely unlikely to result in an apocalypse... as others have said.

 

Which is why I was suggesting other things, like long incubation periods that create a more likely chance for infection spreading (presumably through fluid transfers and the like) before someone becomes a man-eating zombie.  Or maybe something that mutates quickly so that the "zombie" outcome happens after different symptoms over time which would keep the population guessing.

 

Imagine if the common cold virus (a rhinovirus I believe) was co-opted by a zombie virus that only did its work AFTER your cold ran its course.  Phase one: get a cold, spread it around and survive, seemingly with no lasting damage.  Phase two: turn into a zombie some time later.  Also, just like the cold, different people would have different severity of symptoms in the first phase so it would be very difficult to know for sure if someone has the zombie bug.  In that scenario getting the common cold would likely be a societal death sentence.

[Maharin]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

And clearly wikipedia tells us that mutation comes from errors while processing (copying) DNA via RNA. Errors in a chemical process that are not predetermined by the DNA (even though not completely random).

 

Also, the faster a virus replicates the more likely there will be mutations.  Even minor symptoms can be nearly impossible to avoid because our immune systems get overwhelmed by the sheer number of viruses very quickly.  Even if our immune systems then stomp them out relatively quickly after figuring out how to kill them we'll still have a lot of the virus in  us to pass on to others before that happens.

 

Disease vectors adds another whole gotcha factor.  Ticks can carry lots of diseases and not be affected by them personally yet can spread them quite effectively.  If there was a virus that could infect a bacteria that feeds on micro-plastics... watch out world.

 

[Matt115]

2 hours ago, Syphon583 said:

 

Of course, we can debate what you define as a zombie, but in general terms, I'm pretty sure mist will agree that it is a reanimated corpse. This is why I think it's funny that people categorize '28 Days Later' as a zombie movie. Even Danny Boyle, the director, doesn't categorize it as a zombie film.

No. it don't have reanimated corpse fun fuct : CONPLAN_8888-11.pdf (stratcom.mil) it's offical plan of USA military against zombie. So yes 28 days laters is a zombie movie. why? Well they are not vampires. Zombie eat flesh - vampire not. L4D2 have zombie , this same cod or NZA. So make definition is not easy - ghuls are alive creatures that evolved from humans, vampire only drink blood so everything no matter if alive or not but eating human flesh main point of zombie.

2 hours ago, Syphon583 said:

Referring to a discussion about surviving a zombie apocalypse as 'philosophical' is pretty bold. This is pure fantasy, and I think people know that. Any sane person who thinks about biology for a few minutes should come to a realization that a zombie apocalypse is literally impossible due to necrosis. This discussion is for fun. So of course these things are going to be ignored.

 

Zombie apocalypse is impossible but - considering ant's human zombies are possible ( but very very unlikly) but it would be just... guy just stand somewhere high and wait until spore show ups and then corpse just died.

This world is soooooooo boring 

[Matt115]

1 hour ago, Maharin said:

For me this discussion was never about zombie lore (at least my parts of it ).  Zombie lore is, almost completely, unrealistic and extremely unlikely to result in an apocalypse... as others have said.

 

Which is why I was suggesting other things, like long incubation periods that create a more likely chance for infection spreading (presumably through fluid transfers and the like) before someone becomes a man-eating zombie.  Or maybe something that mutates quickly so that the "zombie" outcome happens after different symptoms over time which would keep the population guessing.

 

Imagine if the common cold virus (a rhinovirus I believe) was co-opted by a zombie virus that only did its work AFTER your cold ran its course.  Phase one: get a cold, spread it around and survive, seemingly with no lasting damage.  Phase two: turn into a zombie some time later.  Also, just like the cold, different people would have different severity of symptoms in the first phase so it would be very difficult to know for sure if someone has the zombie bug.  In that scenario getting the common cold would likely be a societal death sentence.

Idk why but this is interesting - Servitors from warhammer 40k (lobotomized cyborgs) would be possible but zombie virus not .

[meganoth]

13 hours ago, Syphon583 said:

I wasn't aware there was a new modern definition of zombies. Guess I'm getting old.

 

Well, Danny Boyle might not classify its movie as a zombie movie, but the general public does. Just search for "zombie movies" in google and 28 days later will show up in position 4 of the list shown. Danny is the creator of the movie but he hasn't any more say in what a zombie is than everyone else.

 

[BFT2020]

On 10/13/2022 at 1:44 PM, Rotor said:

I am sure that is a reference to something I should know, but can't make it out.

 

1) I answered the OPs question (a bit too literally)

2) I am an engineer so I always remember to state uncertainty

3) I am an engineer and this sounds funny in my head

 

Also no reference intended.  But if there is actually one, I will take credit for being so subtle that even I didn't catch it at first  

😉

Edited October 18, 2022 by BFT2020 (see edit history)

[Syphon583]

4 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

Well, Danny Boyle might not classify its movie as a zombie movie, but the general public does. Just search for "zombie movies" in google and 28 days later will show up in position 4 of the list shown. Danny is the creator of the movie but he hasn't any more say in what a zombie is than everyone else.

 

I never said Danny Boyles' opinion was god's written word. The public sees that movie as a zombie movie because they look like zombies, they smell like zombies, they behave like zombies, but they are not zombies. At the end of the day I'm cool with it being described as a zombie movie. The fact that the movie is popular in the zombie genre, though, doesn't change the classic definition of a zombie.

 

I follow the classic definition. You follow the "modern" definition. That's cool. ElDudorino pointed out the irony of philosophically discussing something that is impossible in nature, and I was defending the room because regardless of those facts, it is fun to have a hypothetical discussion as to how long you think you'd survive.

[doughphunghus]

Maybe "how long would you survive.. as a zombie"?

 

There have been a few movies that had the "zombies" be more like normal people. Well, still zombies but they could talk/walk. And even a fun movie i really enjoyed (below). I think it would be a neat idea when bandits arrive to be able to play as a zed (as your character skin, with its abilities, and can carry guns/etc but food is people and animals now) and the "hordes" are the bandits. Also: you should be able to recruit zeds you find wandering to be part of your horde. Everything else about the game is the same (just zeds don't attack you, and mostly people spawn in pois). With a lot of human models added and using the "coyote ai" where it attacks and then runs away for the non bandit humans. I encourage someone to make this mod/overhaul.

 

behold: aaah! Zombies!... which i may have posted a long time ago but i forget

https://imdb.com/title/tt1027762/

 

 

Edited October 18, 2022 by doughphunghus (see edit history)

[Maharin]

Just about every monster ever made has evolved its definition over time.  Vampires have come a long way and are very different from their origins.  Same for werewolves (lycanthropes in general) and, well, you name it.  To say it stops being something because someone added to or changed the lore is kind of pointless.  Most fabled creatures have origin stories from many cultures and from the distant past.  Who's version is correct?  The oldest one?  The most popular one?  /shrug

[Rotor]

1 hour ago, Maharin said:

 Who's version is correct?  

 

Mine!.... ofcourse .

[Matt115]

On 10/18/2022 at 10:47 PM, Maharin said:

Just about every monster ever made has evolved its definition over time.  Vampires have come a long way and are very different from their origins.  Same for werewolves (lycanthropes in general) and, well, you name it.  To say it stops being something because someone added to or changed the lore is kind of pointless.  Most fabled creatures have origin stories from many cultures and from the distant past.  Who's version is correct?  The oldest one?  The most popular one?  /shrug

 

Well.... and many interesting creatures like  guy without head but with spiders legs were forgotten

[Roland]

On 10/18/2022 at 9:10 AM, Syphon583 said:

At the end of the day I'm cool with it being described as a zombie movie.

Well then how about being cool with this thread being described as a zombie pandemic conversation even if we aren’t  sticking to classic definitions?

[Syphon583]

On 10/22/2022 at 9:55 PM, Roland said:

Well then how about being cool with this thread being described as a zombie pandemic conversation even if we aren’t  sticking to classic definitions?

I have nothing against this discussion. It's a fun discussion. I was defending this discussion when someone else was trying to call it out for ignoring basic biology. It was others who decided to pile onto one thing I said.

 

Good grief.

[Roland]

51 minutes ago, Syphon583 said:

I have nothing against this discussion. It's a fun discussion. I was defending this discussion when someone else was trying to call it out for ignoring basic biology. It was others who decided to pile onto one thing I said.

 

Good grief.

 

My post was just a joke. Don't take it so seriously. Sorry if that didn't come through in the text format.

[Syphon583]

4 hours ago, Roland said:

 

My post was just a joke. Don't take it so seriously. Sorry if that didn't come through in the text format.

Yeah, that's my bad. Tone and text just don't play together well, but I've spent enough time here that I should know you better by now. Cheers!

Edited October 24, 2022 by Syphon583 (see edit history)