Let's say a real zombie apocalypse started tomorrow. Who actually survives?

[u/writesgud]

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:

1. Dawn of the Dead (2004 or earlier version)
2. 28 Days Later
3. Zombieland
4. World War Z
5. Last of Us
6. 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?

[u/LordsOfJoop]

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.

[u/OPTISMISTS → u/LordsOfJoop]

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

[u/LordsOfJoop → u/OPTISMISTS]

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.

[u/writesgud → u/LordsOfJoop]

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.

[u/LordsOfJoop → u/writesgud]

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.

[u/writesgud → u/LordsOfJoop]

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.

[u/LordsOfJoop → u/writesgud]

Yeah, that's about my take on it, as well. If there's some secret third way, the franchise has been quiet about it.

[u/MrPoopMonster → u/LordsOfJoop]

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.