Zombie Plans - Revised (Revised)

[Leiana]

Fungus ... human body..... Wouldn't our bodies try to fight off the fungus first?

[Retech]

Not all fungi are incapable of photosynthesis, and by growing in the veins in our skin, the fungus would actually have a greater surface area exposed to sunlight than most trees have for their leaves. Essentially the fungus would receive a wast surplus of energy, far more than what it would require to sustain animation. As for the actual nutrition the fungus requires, it has a vast pantry filling up the entire chest and abdominal cavity of the host, as well as the blood it is replacing.

I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass here, but wouldn't our entire collection of organs and entrails be enough sustenance to keep a fungus alive for at least a few years?

 

No, not at all. Keep in mind that the zombies that you are envisioning include using human locamotion, meaning that it would have to keep muscles and such somewhat alive. It would run out of energy within the week.

 

Not only that, but the area of leaves for trees far exceeds the vein fungus in sunlight capture, mainly because it's DESIGNED FOR IT.

[The_Mather1]

No, the vessels in our skin have a surface area far surpassing that of the leaves on a tree, the average human has about 54,000 blood vessels in their skin, which is not opaque so sub-dermal vessels are exposed to light as well. This totals a surface beyond anything but the needles of large spruce trees.

[archimage_a]

Ok, in summery since the internet ate my last post.

 

3% photosythesis efficency

Sunlight produces 1.96 calories per square centimeter per minute, on average

720 minutes with sunlight on average

Humans need 2,000 Kcalories per day

 

Ergo 0.03*1.96*720=42.336 calories per square centimeter, per day.

 

Ergo needs 4724.1 square centimeters to break even.

 

Total area exposed (Remembering depth doesn't count, since 1.96 calories is the total amount of energy imparted by the sun per meter) of a human is between 0.75 and 1 square meter.

 

Thus Zombie needs about 7 hours of lying down buck naked and with unobstructed sunlight to survive.

 

 

 

So they could work...but it puts them rather at odds with long term survival though, since:

 

A series of storms effectively kills them.

Winter weakens them persistantly, probably killing more than a few.

They have to either sleep during the night and lie awake during the day, with 5 hours of hunting, or risk getting killed while they sleep during the day.

It requires a great deal of energy to set them up, since Chloroplasts need to be grown.

Armour weakens them.

Fur weakens them(And coldness)

Fire weakens them

Losing a limb weakens them

 

They would be a creature that would be on the cusp of viability...the first to die in a catastrophy.

[Retech]

And the melanin present in human skin would help block sunlight, thus only making it viable for the fungus to infect white people.

 

It's like the anti-Columbian exchange. Now the Europeans are getting the deadly diseases.

[archimage_a]

It would be a parasite, not a disease.

[Retech]

Many diseases are caused by parasites. As a viewer of the show "House", you should be aware of this. :)

[The_Mather1]

Note that a lot of the energy we consumed is "wasted" on living, two larger consumers of energy would be our heart and lungs, then comes our digestive system, then our brain, then our filtrating organs.

 

This puts the latest estimate of our heart's energy consumption at 1.71 W, which means 147,744 J or 148 kJ per day, which is equivalent to 35 kCal. So either you have grossly miscalculated or a dead body is essentially a source of infinite energy because 2 kCal - 35 kCal = -33 kCal, or in other words 33 kCal of surplus energy.

[archimage_a]

I would also like to point out that:

1 Watt hour = 0.85984522785899 Kcalories.

 

We need 2,000 Kcalories per day.

 

So 1.7*0.86=1.462

1.462*24=35.088

 

Or 1.7544% of the daily intake.

 

 

 

Also, Parasites are not diseases, though they may cause them...

 

For instance, George Bush is not a War, though he may cause them.

[The_Mather1]

[bleep]ing standardization of random numbers, why can't the world just learn to use mega for Calories and milli for Farad, it's seriously annoying to see 1,000 kCal, 10,000 µF, 2,048 GB, etc.

[archimage_a]

[bleep]ing standardization of random numbers, why can't the world just learn to use mega for Calories and milli for Farad, it's seriously annoying to see 1,000 kCal, 10,000 µF, 2,048 GB, etc.

 

Couldn't agree more.

[Leiana]

Okay, now you guys are involving mathamatics that I personally don't know how to do.

[Alg]

The Tavern: Where we will metagame our way through the zombie apocalypse and to a brighter future!

[archimage_a]

Well I saw Mather's description and took the title literally...Our plans for Zombies...

 

Solider Zombie, GO!

[Fallen_GIGO]

My survival plan for a zombie attack goes like this.

 

After hearing about the dead rising on the news i will

go to the corner shop and steal as much tinned food as possible

and make my way back home fill the bathtub full of water

along with all the bottles in my house full of water

then i will destroy the staircase so nothing can get upstairs

without me knowing.

 

if i was to have to fight any zombies my weapon of choice has to be a crow bar

doesn't run out of ammo and can be used to open doors along with deadly blows

from the weight of the damn thing.

 

if i was to be bitten or infected with the viral outbreak i would kill myself

by injecting air into a vain or jumping head first from the roof of my house

into a paving slab.

[Retech]

So is the plan to outlast the zombie attack?

[The_Mather1]

Outlast it? Too easy. All I'd have to do to manage that is to mount some solar panels on the roof, fill a few barrels with water and set up our still, stock up on McDonald's food (removes the necessity of a freezer/salt barrel since it can last for over a decade) and remove the stairs. Heck I could even get a battery bank and set up one of those emergency PSU thingies that keep the power stable to keep the computer up and running so I wouldn't get bored.

 

Because why worry about the apocalypse when you can live through it with all of your everyday luxuries except for the internet.

 

Yes, we do have a still, because... clean... water. *whistle*

[Retech]

Fast food would kill you faster than the zombies would.

[The_Mather1]

Meh, Omega-3 capsules.

 

Also I just thought of a nice past-time; donning my MC clothes then go down and chop up zombies until I'm not longer bored, then climb back up. Because what can be more awesome than donning a full-body, padded kevlar suit and going dual backswords against a bunch of brainless sleepwalkers?

[archimage_a]

So...with Mather dead, having been attacked after attempting to climb his stairs, which he had removed...

 

On a more serious note, if someone survived on the premise of slow walking zombies then a lot of people would survive.

Ergo, you would either be killed collecting supplies (highly likely) or killed/taken in by other survivours.

 

 

Would also premise that if you were the ONLY survivour about, then the zombies would congregate, thus disabling you from moving...and would, in all probability, cause your house/tree/whatever to collapse eventually.

 

 

The real question is why would you want to survive?

You live a long, unproductive life, and then you die.

[The_Mather1]

Not my stairs obviously, I mean onto my wood shed, onto the roof above my back door, onto the garage roof and in through my sister's window. That amount of acrobatics would by the way be impossible for any zombie I know of other than the fast zombie from Half-Life 2, the Hunter from L4D and the mutants from I am Legend.

 

And why would uselessness be discouraging? Do you have any idea how many people that actually enjoy living on welfare? How would unproductivity be a concern to them?

[archimage_a]

Your point being that given the choice between becoming a leech, and becoming a zombie...you would chose becoming a leech?

Hardly a compelling argument.

 

 

Wouldn't the zombies eventually collapse the woodshed through sheer weight of numbers?

...or, through the many many times you swung yourself up there, you would take a mistep and fall?

Or a pile of zombies, bodies or other paraphenalia eventually forming a ramp?

Or snow allowing the zombies to gain access.

 

Also, if you were, for instance, walking, and tripped, falling badly, injuring your arm...wouldn't you then be somewhat less capable in the skill of acrobatics, and thus have a hard time climbing up onto your roof?

[The_Mather1]

I have no problem climbing up there, and I could do so almost one-handed.

 

The zombies would not be able to collapse the wood shed because you need tonnes of force to collapse such a structure sideways and neither snow or bodies could pile the 5 meter up to the garage roof, and even then the zombies wouldn't be smart enough to break open and climb through the window before marching straight off the other side of the roof

[archimage_a]

On the premise that Zombies don't break windows....

 

Generally, in films, Zombies gravitate towards people...and unless you had a cage with people in 'off the other side of the roof' they would, seemingly, head directly for the window.

 

 

On the premise of needing 'tonnes of force', I would remind you that if the zombies only weighed...70 pounds each, it would only take 32 of them to equal one tonne, and if they weight 100 pounds each it would only take 22 of them.

Further they would be pressing towards you, so you would add part of their muscular to the force against you, say...20-30 pounds(Pulling numbers out of the air) which would decrease the number further still...

 

Then consider that they aren't trying to knock it over in one great push, but over the course of several months (lets say) and so, gradually the shed would become weaker.

 

So, if we assume that there are 40-60 zombies around your wood shed, too many for you to SAFELY* dispatch, then they would, over the course of a few weeks, destroy your wood shed, trapping you in the house, which they will erode over time and eventually collapse as well.

 

 

I would also say that the zombies would probably ignore your wood shed and simply destroy the walls of your house...in precisely the same way as they are always portrayed as doing.

So your still, food supply and ect would all be wasted.

 

I would further say that 'Raiding the local McDonalds, Removing your Staircase, Setting up a Distillation machine, Installing Solar Panels and collecting several barrels of water' requires a significantly longer period than you would probably have in a zombie invasion.

Initally you would have to become aware of it, which would probably take between an hour and 16 hours, depending on if you were asleep, what the circumstances behind it were, ect ect.

On becoming aware of it would take several hours to remove your stairs(Not familiar with your stairs, could take less, but for a job well done it would probably take four hours or so).

Supposing you had the distillation machine componants, it would take another several hours to set those up, if you didn't have them, maybe a day of driving around (Again, no idea how close you are to your local DIY/whatever shop to loot).

Again with the Solar Panels, if you already had them, then great, a few hours on them. If not then you have to find them and install them, so we are talking about a day, day and a half if you were asleep SO FAR.

Raiding McDonalds...depending on how far away it was, density of zombies, how reckless you were feeling...1-5 hours.

 

Thusly, with your house to zombie fortress conversion completed, you would have spent two days...during which time the zombie hoard would have had more than enough time to kill you, and more than enough opportunity.

 

If you were consulting your friends and family for help, good chance they are also zombies, so increased risk there.

 

If you were insanely lucky during the first week, and then were not beset by more than 15 zombies at any given time, I think you could probably survive for a year or too...Before the barrel water had been used up, through a combination of spillage, sweating and urinating while locked in mortal combat.

If you happened to not particularly beset by zombies then this wouldn't be much of a problem, of course, because you could fashion buckets and just get more water from nearby, run it through the still to kill any bacteria or whatever and enjoy.

 

 

Of course, after about a year nature would slowly begin reclaiming your house(I would assume, I don't know what the environment around your house is, but generally speaking grass would begin growing long...and unless you were not beset by zombies, it would be difficult to trim it back constantly. This would be fed by the remains of the many hundreds of zombies you killed, obviously)

Ivy would probably be a menace, so would require you to cut, while fighting zombies.

If you were only living upstairs then downstairs would probably get infested with various molds and such, who's spores would make you ill.

And even if the zombies couldn't reach you that is not to say that rats couldn't, who's population, fed on fields left unharvested by humans, and by the bodies of thousands, would blossem to the point where they would eventually exaust natural food sources and thus begin starving, and thus would come after you at one point or another...what with McDonald's smell eminating from your house.

 

All of this, of course, ignoring that your central heating would be a massive energy drain during the winter months, when your output was lowest (Lots of specifics, may or may not be a problem).

Though eventually your boiler (Assuming you have water radiators in Norway and not something else), would break down, or run out of water, requiring you to use space heaters...which cut into your energy budget more dramatically...as well as having to be acquired.

 

Not to mention wear and tear on your clothes, weapons, computer, floors, carpets, windows, ect, ect...

 

Yes...I would say that your life would, if you sat on your laurels, didn't tackle problems before they occured, or were surrounded by zombies, be terminated fairly quickly.

If you dealt with problems cooly, efficently and didn't take risks...I can't see why you wouldn't survive a few years perhaps.

 

 

Though your whole plan hinges on being the only human, which is rather flawed, as I have stated many times before and won't preceed to bore you with.

Plan further hinges on the traditional zombie plot, and even further hinges on nothing unexpected happening (Say getting stung in the eye by a wasp).

 

 

*Or whatever number you would deem yourself incapable of killing, since I know you will claim that you can kill them all with ease.

[Ieyfura]

I think it'd be harder to choose to be a zombie over a leech. Mainly because when it comes down to it, our base instinct is to survive. Also, after the apocalypse, or during, you could attempt to rebuild the human race. At least that's how I'd see it.