Zombies would wipe themselves out

[Steviefaux]

So I was thinking a while back and Richard Herring turned out said the same one day on his podcast.

 

Surely zombies would wipe themselves out. If we went with the old law of the slow ones, they bite you, leave you, you turn. But, most times they bite you and continue eating until nothing is left. They only ever leave you if they get distracted by another loud noise. So if they don't keep getting distracted, every new person they meet, they'll eat enough you won't turn. If there was only 10 of them and if they slowly rotted away, for more to appear they'd have to bite and walk away but they never will so should all eventually rot away.

 

We're not gonna mention it would be super easy to round them up into a pen and then burn them all.

 

Don't get me started on the annoying part of Walking Dead when they kept getting sentimal and needed to "Bury" people they knew that had been bitten. Why? You're away they were "diseased" so why let them rot into the soil potentially contaminating said soil. Just get over it and throw them on a bonfire. Lots of spiritual folks burn their dead, nothing wrong with it and you'll be sure you're slowly wiping out the disease.

 

Random post of the day.

[syfy]

i like your Random post. don't take this Meme sarcastically please

 

[Dcar]

If you want to spoon-feed a dose of realism into things, then zombies based on a virus aren't a realistic apocalypse option.  It's a Hollywood horror theme park and not much else.

 

If we assume zombies are just dead enough to avoid tissue degeneration (so they can keep moving), then we have to work around the, "how much do they need to eat," conundrum.  If we argue one zombie being torn into meaty bits would be enough to feed 20 other zombies per day, then the population would only be able to really grow exponentially in a rapid burst before meeting whatever kind of resistance slows that growth (natural barriers, big walls, etc).  After that initial explosion, the population would fall by a little less than 5% per day if we assume the 1:21 ratio were correct and we also assume every zombie were completely eaten instead of having part of the body go uneaten and left to rot.

 

The whole thing wouldn't last more than a month before survivors come out of the ruins and/or people from the outside come into the infected zone to clean up.  It's more reasonable to consider the bulk of the zombie apocalypse as the remnants of the infection always lurking in the shadows and re-infecting people on occasion.  It'd work as a kind of dystopian fallout-ish landscape where you just don't know if you'll bump into the leftovers of the virus unless you're in a known-clean city-state safe zone kind of place.  Venturing out to go find things always means risking bringing the infection back in with you.  Bob forbid the virus on the outside mutates and has a long incubation period which would be able to get through re-entry quarantine procedure.