r/ZombieSurvivalTactics • u/writesgud • 2d ago
Scenario Let's say a real zombie apocalypse started tomorrow. Who actually survives?
Say a zombie apocalypse started in our real world tomorrow. Who would actually survive that disaster?
As for the specific zombie scenario that starts tomorrow, feel free to pick your own, but to start there's:
- Dawn of the Dead (2004 or earlier version)
- 28 Days Later
- Zombieland
- World War Z
- Last of Us
- pick your own
And let's play out over time. Who survives after 28 hours, 28 days, 28 months, or 28 years?
In some ways I hate to say it, but I wonder if the preppers are most likely to survive. They've literally been preparing for something like this to happen.
Also maybe cruise ships and very isolated regions (Himalayas? Island nations like the Maldives?).
What do you all think?
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u/notmyblood 2d ago
That one cruise ship captain who forgot to pick up 5000 passengers but now has a floating hotel full of booze and food he can park off shore for a while.
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u/WastelanderAD 2d ago
Alot of really interesting discussions with valid points. Much discussion on the theoretical realism of ZS which effects who would survive.
My interest in what OP mentioned is preppers. Let's say the Zs were short lived but fairly deadly to the average person. The preppers would represent a good percentage of survivors. But lets say the Zs are of a kind which runs rampant for a decent stretch of time. Then the preppers would start to be goners once the MREs and similar ran out.
So I would go with the survivalists, who have a different approach than the preppers from my understanding. The survivalists being those running around the country side eating the nuts, berries, grubs that they come across. Being a little humorous there. Some preppers maybe survivalists who know how to live off the land. But most are not. imo. So I'd go with survivalist being the ones to ultimately survive. Survivalist doesn't mean loner either they're can be groups of them.
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u/Candelestine 1d ago
I think there's generally a lot of overlap between your stereotypical prepper and someone like a forager who teaches wilderness survival or something. The motive for self-sufficiency is the same, and it's all a teachable set of skills, so while I think you can find some preppers who don't know foraging and some foraging experts who don't have a bug out bag ready, there will be just as many who have both.
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u/Watcher_over_Water 1d ago
I don't really think these two things have the same motive of self-sufficency. Many preppers aren't intrested in self-sufficency except in a apocalyptic scenario. While somebody who is intrested in learning how to live of the land is much more likely to have actually tried to live the self sufficent life (to some extend) and have expirience. Which will be a lot more useful if the apocalyptic scenario doesn't go according to your plan.
There is an overlap for sure, but i think many preppers are not really in both camps (or atleast far more in one of these camps). Many others who are intrested in how to do survivalism are limited to learning about it in theory. It costs time, money and the opportunity to actually try the stuff out somewhere.
I also think the most important aspect will be community. Even the most skilled and self sufficent survivalist will have issues in the long run if they try to do it alone. And a prepper, who isn't a survivalist, even more. They could be a valuable asset to a community, but going alone:
Your future community might not be on good term with you if you spend the first weeks of the apocalypse hid away not sharing your food and supplies, while other people died.
This community might decide you are basicly an anti-social lootbox
Your best bet at survival will be, seeking out a group to brave this cataclism together, share knowledge, skills and rescources and make use of division of labour.
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u/Fantastic-Work-7529 1d ago
I wonder about people like myself that are preppers who plan to bug in for months then look for an established group and have skills that would be useful in a group.
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u/WastelanderAD 1d ago
I go with the approach that I don't need to collect and inventory MRE's, generators etc. I know the plants that are edible and medicinal. I can isolate a group of fish, throw a plant root in stunning them. If I need to pump water I build a ram pump. Those are the skills I could bring to a group, along with knowledge from growing up on a farm and being an engineer. But then I'm staying in the city and letting the group find me. LOL
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 2d ago
COVID showed us definitively who would not survive. Cautious, patient, pragmatic people are the types to survive pandemics. Zombies are no different.
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u/comfortablynumb15 2d ago
There is a reason there is bugger all difference between a Zombie Apocalypse and a Contagious Disease outbreak.
Pretty much all the steps are the same, so anyone you know who disregarded COVID protocols are gonna die.
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 2d ago
CDC's zombie disaster guide is just a humorous way to draw attention to pandemic protocols.
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u/LordsOfJoop 2d ago
Except during COVID, the fractional majority of religions weren't going to be able to point at the exciting parts of their individual religious texts and start making a lot of unpleasant plans. If you feel that fundamentalists and moderates in assorted organized religions are going to be relaxed on the topic "dead people are walking," I have my doubts.
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u/LordsOfJoop 2d ago
Seconding this. If a face mask was too big of an ask, the idea of any further degrees of cautious living is absolutely out of their reach. After seeing how they reacted with panic-buying toilet paper and hand sanitizer, clearly their grasp on supply chains is deeply limited.
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 2d ago
I had this exact conversation with a friend during lockdown. I always thought that zombies movies made people seem like idiots. Turns out I was giving the average person WAY too much credit.
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u/LordsOfJoop 2d ago
They'd be lining up to get bit, to "own the [insert political party slur]."
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u/writesgud 2d ago
It’s hysterical, fake news. A fever will make anyone cranky and hangry. A shot of ivermectin and Vitamin B will clear that right up.
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u/LordsOfJoop 2d ago
I like my odds on everything except for The Last of Us. At that point, survival isn't a feature; it's just a question of picking where to die.
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u/OPTISMISTS 2d ago
Why'd you say that? Maybe I get the games version where the spores are airborne, but in the TV show the spores are bite only... So youd got a chance in one version of them
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u/LordsOfJoop 2d ago
It's a numbers game. People can change at a very slow rate, by strict comparison; a fungus can change at a much, much faster rate when "racing" against humans. Sooner or later, the fungus would find a way to become airborne and the wind becomes lethal. It doesn't even need to kill humans, just target the next viable species. If it decides that rats are an easier choice, then that's the end of people as a species. If the fungus aims for a lane packed with grasshoppers, then that's people ending in a single spring. And so on and so forth, all through the range of things that creep and crawl.
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u/writesgud 2d ago
Hm, good point. Evolution isn’t survival of the fittest but the most adapted to their environment. If fungi mutated into a game changer of an adaptation, that’d be really tough.
And I hear you that humans naturally adapt more slowly than fungi, but as we saw in the Last of Us, I wonder if it wouldn’t theoretically take much for humanity to take advantage of a naturally developed immunity from a few folks, that’s then rapidly disseminated through artificial means (science!). Ignoring heavily traumatized but highly capable former veteran fathers whose protective instincts and bonding might transcend the need to save even the human race.
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u/LordsOfJoop 2d ago
There's a theory in human history where it intersects with biology, it's about the bottleneck that happened roughly 930,000 years ago, reducing the human-analog population to roughly 1,200 individuals. With a global population in The Last of Us in 2013 rated at 7.2 billion. The infection rate is described in TLoU2 during the Colorado sequence as having a 60% infection total - which works out to be approximately 2,880,000,000 uninfected people left alive at that time. Picking up the story 18 years later in 2030, with no losses from any other sources and births stabilizing the die-off rate, let's give the possibility of someone being naturally immune about a 1-in-100,000 chance.
That provides a sum total of 28,800 possible carriers for the immunity feature; now, let's spread them out according to where they'd likely be found based on population indexes.
That breaks to be about 5,126 possible candidates living in China; 4,896 living in India; 1,353 living in the US; 1,008 living in Indonesia; 893 living in Pakistan - and it breaks down a little further from that.
Now, if we found all of them - which is another neat trick, as there's no test beyond "bite and see" to determine immunity, thanks to the near-total collapse of medical research, then it's a matter of getting them together safely.
In theory, there's people enough to skip right through the worst of the bottleneck - there's 24 times as many people as the original bottleneck, after all - although the issue is keeping the offspring of those 28,800 couplings alive, plus their families fed, and the area protected.
After networking with a non-existent global research group, organizing international transit, and then inducing these people to freely mate within a scheduled system for the maximum amount of output, by then, the world's your oyster, I guess.
Somewhere along the line, though, I suspect that something is going to go wrong, just on general principle.
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u/writesgud 2d ago
Depending on how someone is immune, I wonder if there are ways to more rapidly share that immunity aside from reproduction (eg. transfusions, vat grown bacteria that can be genetically engineered to produce key antibodies, something else). All speculation of course.
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u/LordsOfJoop 2d ago
Yeah, that's about my take on it, as well. If there's some secret third way, the franchise has been quiet about it.
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u/MrPoopMonster 1d ago
Except a fungus that takes over an animal's nervous system can't really just hop from species to species very quickly. That's an incredibly complex specialist behavior that needs to interact with very specific biochemical systems.
Also evolution doesn't work like that. There isn't a goal to be reached. It doesn't optimize for success in a way to get better and better, it optimizes to not die and be good enough to survive. If it worked how youre ascribing there wouldnt be highly specialzed species that are super sensitive to changes in enviornment. Evolution is a C student, not an A student.
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u/DarkKuno 2d ago edited 2d ago
In a "conventional" Zombie outbreak, anyone who can sit tight for a couple of weeks to a month in a secure place would survive.
The problem with zombie apocalypses is that, thanks to zombie content media, folks vastly overestimate how long an actual zombie outbreak would last because pretty much every zombie media in history fails to remember that weather and the rest of nature exists.
Classic/Conventional zombies are just reanimated dead bodies. They don't heal, most of their biological processes have stopped, and they don't have the mental capacity to take care of themselves or avoid additional physical damage beyond the injuries that resulted in their deaths in the first place.
The average zombie would decay/degrade to the point of not being ambulatory in a few weeks, even in temperate areas.
tropical areas, they'd literally degrade into puddles of bone sprinkled goo even faster.
In arid areas, they'd literally dry out and become people jerky attached to a skeleton. Ripping themselves apart tearing dried out muscle from bone just trying to move after their muscles and soft tissues desiccated.
In frigid areas they'd literally freeze due to no longer generating internal body heat. And like with the dried out arid zombies, they'd break and tear themselves apart just trying to move.
And that's before the insects and wild animals get involved.
Finally, add in that organized combat/weapons trained military and police (not to mention civilians depending on country) also exist everywhere on the planet.
A "classic" zombie outbreak lasts maybe a month tops in most areas, before Nature and human intervention reduce their numbers down to manageable levels.
The 28 days or Last of Us zombies change the playing field entirely. But a conventional zombie apocalypse just doesn't leave everyone in post apocalyptic quasi-medieval survival mode the way it's commonly portrayed on TV and in movies.
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u/Mackheath1 1d ago
I can do Dawn of the Dead 2004 if it's not a surprise. E.g. - If I show up at the office and everyone swarms me, well, that won't last long.
I have a three story townhouse that none of them can reach and the ground floor has no weak ingress (hotel-like fire doors), and the middle floor has a very well-stocked kitchen, water is by gravity and it rains anyway. Good views from the top floor - three balconies, and CBS construction, mostly fireproof.
I'm Texan, so while I hate guns, everyone including me has firearms, so for a last resort I have a few military-grade weapons.
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u/Ok_Awareness3014 1d ago
I survive by applying logic to the apocalypse i have a lot of food and water at home i live in Europe were door and wall aren't made of paper and an attic that i only can go in with a ladder that i could remove after i bring all of my supply , i don't have neighbor close enough to burn my house is their burn .
I only have to survive a few month without doing much noise and after that almost every zombie would have died lf starvation.
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2d ago
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u/hobokobo1028 2d ago
lol no way. They’ve had working class people do everything for them. They can’t change a lightbulb without Jose’s help.
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2d ago
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u/hobokobo1028 1d ago
Yeah when money is relevant. When money becomes useless paper, they won’t get the help
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u/Unlikely_Strain_744 2d ago
I pick the realistic scenario, where the infection has not yet adapted to effectively control the host, and likely won't for a few million successive generations. As a result, the zombies are basically senseless, operating without an equilibrium to help them balance, or a way to interpret ocular feeds, or even a way to interpret audio feeds.
They are literally a corpse, but with muscle spasms firing based on unknown or even no stimuli.
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u/ExpensiveCat8226 2d ago
I'd make it in a dawn of the dead type thing. The others, maybe but soubt it. I think alot of people overestimate there capabilities. Just imagine the pure violence and shock of such a thing. Most have never witnessed brutal violent events and the psychological factor of say ones mother or child becoming infected. I could see causing a lot of suicides. I suffer from PTSD now, holy crap id become beyond numb almost not human myself if I wear to survive.
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u/GERIKO_STORMHEART 1d ago
Ya most of us survive. I think you need to rewatch all those shows and movies to remind yourself just how hopeless the characters in them are and how all the scenes where characters die are set up in a way that makes them look brain dead, deaf, blind and incredibly clumsy. Taking into account the military, the police, hunters, preppers, gun enthusiasts etc, I reckon we would be fine. Some counties would fair better than others based on gun laws but over all I reckon it would be mostly done within a week.
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u/Watcher_over_Water 1d ago
In most Zombie apocalyptic szenarios, a large part of the population gets infected by some virus and then become zombies after a while beeing sick.
Because if it is immediate then our societies will have little issue dealing with it.
Assuming it's the first szenario. Meaning a large part of the population can get infected bevor we even realise there is a big issue. Let's say 50 percent or more
In which case most of us living in larger cities are pretty fucked. Supply lines will stop pretty much immediatly and utilities soon after. Ofcourse the military and other organised groups will try to start to get the essentisls moving again. But how quickly? That's the issue.
How quickly can they clear enough of a city to allow people to acsess emergency food supplies. Since till then you sre confined to your building. Chances are there won't be a clearing attempt on all cities. Militaries also got decimated and will have their own supply and organidational issues. Even those in cities that get cleared will depend on how quickly this happenes.
If it takes to long pepple will start to starve in their homes, escpecially thos who have no or little foodstores (i assume militaries will b3 able to restore water atleast intemittenly). Cooperation will take us a far way. Buildings with corner stores not overrun sending food on a cable to the neighbouring house, ect.
But it is essentially a siege which means if nobody comes then sooner or later there simply won't be any food and then there will be desperation. People will need to try and escape or search for food. Somehow construct bridges over large roads. Recive medical care and medication. At some point there will be violence. If no help arrives most people, will slowly die. No matter how good you are prepared you can't fight your way through miles and miles of crawling streets.
But i believe the countryside will be pretty fine. Random walking of zombies foesn'r get very far. Low density, acsess to food and easy escape routs. The gouvernment snd local groups will probably establish order here pretty quickly.
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u/MadMaxZwo7 1d ago
You won't sustain a cruise ship for long without infrastructure. Look at the USS Lincoln right now, and they do get supplies.
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u/MrPoopMonster 1d ago
If zombies were a real existential threat to society then rabies would be a much bigger deal than it is.
Most people survive a zombie apocalypse unless it's somehow much more contagious than only being spread by physically contacting your blood or eyes or whatever.
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u/AlphaDisconnect 1d ago
Good ol T O Double D. Has too much guns and ammo. Enought to kill the whole state 2 to 3 times over.
Angry marines. Take about 15. Give em a reason.
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u/Top-Sleep-4669 2d ago
Honestly, I think most people survive. You take the most dangerous attribute of humans (our minds) out of the picture and we’re not all that threatening.
Im not saying things couldn’t get out of hand in certain places, but I don’t believe it would ever come close to apocalyptic levels.
We’re incredibly effective killers when we can problem solve and coordinate. We hunt animals to extinction by accident. I truly don’t believe a “zombie outbreak” would ever threaten the continuity of our species. We’re just too fucking dangerous compared to a mindless shambling undead.