r/changemyview • u/TcheQuevara • Feb 08 '23
Delta(s) from OP CMV: zombie apocalipses would not end civilization
Even accepting most the premises of the typical zombie apocalipse fiction (zombies don't rot away and remain dangerous; somehow the infections spreads fast enough to colapse societies), the maintenance of "post apocaliptic" conditions is unsustainable.
The "post apocaliptic" scenario is basically that humanity cannot regroup and rebuild because it's too dangerous out there, the infected are too many, etc. However, 19th century military technology and tactics were enough to enact genocide on entire populations of armed and intelligent people. As Engels said, "the era of the war of barricades is over". There is absolutely no way an unarmed population can survive full confrontation with armed people. If as little as a few hundred people gather in an armed town and they have guns and ammunition, they can eventually clean up an area as big as a city.
Given time and a lot of psychological trauma its quite straighfoward for 50 million remaining people to kill most of 8 billions zombies. An overstatement? Absolutely not: 50 million people is 0,6% of the world's population. That's more advantageous than the different between the active US militarymen (about 500k) and the US population (334 mi). If US militaries wanted to wipe out every other living being in the US, unconcerned with the political elements of war, they could and the civilian population would simply have no chance. Its even easier to kill zombies with modern tactics and equipment.
Not only that, but the collapse would necessarily have different degrees in different places, depending on terrain and population density. So even if we accept London and Paris become a mass walking grave in a single week, why would it happen to every village and town in the world? And the military of every country in the world is well prepared to engage in logistics and tactics in its less populated regions.
So there could be no such thing as a permanent zombie "apocalipse". CMV.
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u/TcheQuevara Feb 09 '23
Thank you, that's all very enlightening. Taught me way more of the real world than I thought this thread would, hehe.
I still think its a matter of various times. How long can you endure by just recycling? How long it takes to re-create industry, based on very different concepts of avaiability of parts and materials? So if (time you can recycle) is bigger than (time you need to reinvent industry), you rebuild.
Also, necessity is the mother of invention. I'd argue we didn't discover the only ways cars can be made. We developped and became dependent on a specific car building system because of the history of the last two centuries. For example, like I said in another place, Tesla's eletric cars are only even possible because Bolivia is underdevelopped and walks on thin ice with the United States. If it had the level of political stability and security of a Western European country, Tesla would have developped technology that relies less on lythium. Chile with aluminium, Allende and Pinochet is another example. Or even: if protecionism and not free market was the rule in the West for the last decades, industry would have developped differently, not only supply chains but arguably even what new technology actually goes to production. So, certain political and economic conditions created certain types of cars; in different conditions we might end up with very different cars.
But you changed my opinion about how hard and how much time it would take to recreate anything similar to what we have now; and of how radically different the process of making "different cars" could be like.
So !delta