I’m sure every prepper, gamer, and horror film enthusiasts alike have pondered what would happen if a zombie apocalypse actually occurred. Well, so did the physics students of Leicester University, who theorized that it would only take 100 days for zombies to completely take over.
According to a report by the University of Leicester Press Office on 5 January 2017, a group of students researched how humanity would handle a zombie virus. Every year, the school tasks students with applying scientific models to real-world applications. They presented their findings in a series of short articles for the Journal of Physics Special Topics, a peer-reviewed student journal run by the University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. According to them, it would take 100 days for the following conditions to occur:
- Less than 300 people would remain alive globally.
- Human survivors would be outnumbered a million to one by zombies.
These calculations were made on a variety of assumptions about the zombie virus. This included the idea that one zombie could find one person every day, and that each instance had a 90% chance of infecting the human.
After an initial response, the group decided that they hadn’t fully calculated mankind’s ability to adapt and cope with adverse situations. After re-running their estimations, they determined that people are better at killing and “re-populating” than previously assumed. They also took people’s ability to live in the wilderness into greater account, like in the mountains, for example.
With new information, the team then came to the conclusion that it would take 1,000 days (2.7 years) before the last zombie would be defeated. In another 25 years, the human population would enter the recovery phase.
This is why wilderness survival is one of the most important things to learn when prepping for a SHTF scenario. It doesn’t have to be zombies that end society. It could be war, political collapse, or natural disasters. In every case, the ability to escape to the mountains and live off the land will be what makes you one of the 300 remaining humans.
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If you take into account trained armies, bunkers made for surviving for multiple years, and the existing castles which can be updated for zombie survival, things start to look a lot better.
First, once you get there, make sure there are no accessible windows for the first few 3-5 meters from the ground level. Then, you need to cover most windows, since zombies might be attracted to movement, and people definitely will. If a zombie outbreak would have happened in medieval times, it would likely not affect their society by much. People underestimate the powers of castles, ring forts, hill forts, defensive walls with arrow-shooting&stone-falling platform, and if you have fuel, tanks.
Second, you need to have solar panels on the roof, and possibly also some smaller windmills, and batteries to store some power.
Third, greenhouses. Use the power to get some water from the soil or from a nearby river (would need the pipe to be hidden a few cm under the soil, to not be destroyed by zombies), use LEDs for growing vegetables, and if you can, have 2 people go to harvest biomass (leaves, weeds, etc.) to feed to edible insects. With insects and plants, you only need cheese for the daily diet. If you can also afford to grow some chickens for eggs, all the better, but you need to feed them even more.
Fourth, if you can, bring lots of fire wood inside, and fuel, and if you know how to, make a rocket mass stove (to convert most of the wood into heat).
Fifth, I know people will want to have some alone time, but the smaller a room, the less fuel is needed to heat it. And the bigger a room is, the more people can sleep in it at once.
Sixth, night watch, and day watch. At least 3 shifts. Like everything else, they have to not attract attention from the outside.
Seventh, if you’ve got books, you can read. If you’ve got paper and ink, you can write. If you’ve got wood as well, you can even mass-produce books with wood block printing. Very useful for post- SHTF. Especially since you only have to draw a map once, and it can be re-printed very cheap and fast.
Eight: Train with medieval weapons as well. They’re lighter than they look, though the armor is heavier than it looks. A shield and axe can save your life, and a bow and arrow can help you to avoid unnecessary fights.
Ninth: If you can afford to, grow the settlement. More people can join, and you can have them working the fields (not greenhouses), and making another wall if the castle doesn’t have one (anymore or never had), and have the new people build houses inside the new wall.
Tenth: Make sure to have a pedal-powered vehicle with a strong-enough cabin around it, for transport between settlements or settlement and outposts.
Eleventh: Settlements under military chain of command usually have some very useful tech. Trading with them will lead to showing them what you can produce, which would make it more likely for them to share some of that tech with you.
Twelfth: Some fine tuning will be needed between hoarding resources and trading with others. Books are somewhat useful for learning skills, and are much more effective for learning skills if there is someone with that skill who can help clear some confusion and explain some misunderstood or not understood things.
Thirteenth: Refrigeration might not be needed in colder climates, but in hotter climates it’s more needed, almost critical. If you can somehow compress air, have 2 tubes, a thinner one and a wider one. The volume of the inside of the thinner one should be (preferably a few times) smaller than that of the volume difference between the outside of the thin pipe and inside of the thicker pipe. If you compress air, it heats up. If the compressed air is cooled to ambient temperature, when it’s released from high pressure to ambient pressure, the temperature will drop. Thanks to it going back on the outside of the small pipe, the air will get even colder before being released, making the system more efficient. Wind and water power are perfect for that.