C Lion said:
So what you're saying here, if I may boil it down, is that everyone will survive because you say so. Trust me, you can't ignore the human element. In fact, it's the most important part. Someone is going to do something stupid. Always. Besides, your barricades/doors/whatever separates you and them won't last forever, and more and more zombies will surround you every day with all the commotion(and don't say they'll never know you're in there, they will, especially after a year). Salvage runs would become extremely dangerous, escape would be impossible. In fact, after about a week of zombies wandering to your shelter, you probably wouldn't make it back in.
EDIT: BTW, watching your friends eaten alive and then rising to come eat you does not, in fact, make you stronger.
No. I never said that everyone will survive. Actually, I said the exact opposite. It was sort of my point.
I also said that salvage runs would be unnecessary.
The reason people would survive is because in the real world, there's this thing called physics. Natural laws and all that jazz. Gravity is one of them. Zombies in the real world can't fly, and they don't float up into the air.
Another one of those pesky annoying laws that get into the way of zombie fiction takes a look at energy. Or there's several such laws actually. One of them states that without energy you can't move. That goes for zombies as well, unless they have an external energy source, like say, food, for instance, they won't be able to move. They'll die. (Or go completely inert, at least)
The other one touches on momentum and force, and mass, and all that jazz, and it's relevant because it's fairly easy to construct a barrier that a human can't break through, no matter what. A barrier that several generations of humans couldn't break through, no matter their number. (Unless of course, they have tools for it, but zombies are usually portrayed as without them.)
One example would be an iron wall, say, a metre thick. They can't get through that. Those walls don't pop up out of nowhere, of course, which is a bit annoying. However, stone and wood work almost equally well, you just need more of it.
Of course, zombies could always pile up on top of each other, and get over your wall. That's going to be a problem. There are ways around that though. You could build layered walls, and add a moat between them, that way you have a nice way of flushing out the zombies as they get closer.
But the real thing is that zombies in real life wouldn't be as dangerous as they are in movies, AND even more importantly, it's only the first few days that are really dangerous. After that our species will have recovered from the initial schock, and we will be able to deal with the situation. The human species is pretty darn good at that, as evidenced by us surviving as long as we have. We can adapt any enviroment to fit us, we can even survive in fucking space.
You underestimate humanity as a whole. While I'm often guilty myself of claiming human stupidity on a lot of things, while I despise what society has become, while I think that most of humanity could probably do with a bullet in their head, and that the only way to salvage what our species has become is probably a clean start, in a situation such as this hypothetical one, it's just not true.
Humanity can, and will, overcome almost any obstacle nature, or anything else could throw our way. The only way that zombies could ever pose a threat to the species is if they had an intelligence co-ordinating them from behind, and keeping them supplied and fed. Other than that it's only the initial schock that's dangerous, at all.
You also state that zombies would find my fort. That's highly unlikely, but let's say they're magical. They're still zombies, and they're still walking, and there's a hell of a lot of land to cross, so even if they magically know where my forts are, it takes them quite a while to get there. We get plenty of advance warning. We could probably kill all zombies coming our way, or we could reinforce our defences and pick them off slowly. 100 zombies for everyone of us isn't that many. Say 9/10 of us die. That's a thousand zombies per individual. We could still probably kill those zombies, but even if we don't, there are many places in the world where zombies couldn't survive, and where we could. Given that we have access to basic technology, we can easily construct bases, or hideouts zombies can't reach. Not even going to vehicles, we can use rope to climb up inaccesible places. We can build obstacles we can easily traverse.
Hell, we could just pick a place zombies naturally can't survive in, boil them in a desert, or move to the thundra.
Now if you state that these are zombies, and they can only be killed through the brain, they don't need food, and none of these laws apply to them, then I'm going to throw a fireball into the horde of zombies, then I'll fly to America, pick up a nuke or two, and juggle them over the zombies head, before accidently dropping them, eliminating the zombie horde. The radiation will give me super powers, and cause edible pink flowers to grow out of every rock.
You know why? Because then we're not in this world anymore, and the laws of physics decided to leave.
Sorry, this has gotten way too long, and I'm just rambling. The fact is that it's almost physically impossible for zombies to wipe out the human species. Sure, they can do a hell of a lot of damage, perhaps they could even wipe out most of our species (highly, highly doubtful). Given every possible advantage they might bring us down to a million people.
The thing though is that zombies physically can't traverse every obstacle. Zombies need a source of energy. Zombies die underwater. Zombies have a limited mass, and can't bring more force than that mass allows to bear. We can grow our own food. We can find what we need to survive. We can cooperate, if we need to, one way or another. For one person to ensure the destruction of everyone that person would have to actively try to do it, and probably plan for a while before doing it (sort of like in the movies, where it's always an illogicaly bad time that someone breaks down, and they do so in the one way that would allow zombies to kill everyone).
