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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3849396" data-attributes="member: 4937">Fortunately, centralized control and coordination is not necessary for short term survival.   In practice, humans rarely rely on centralized control for anything precisely because they know that even an efficient and non-corrupt large bureaucracy has a ponderous responce time.  For example, its for this reason that direct democracy is rarely employed for anything larger than a small village.  Effectively, direct democracy turns the whole populace into a large bureaucracy/decision making apparatus.  System theory seems to indicate that the ideal size of a decision making structure is 5-12 individuals, ideally as closely placed to the problem as possible to prevent effectively extending the decision making structure, information loss due to lag in communication and/or poor communication/understanding of the problem.  It's difficult to project how humanity would respond to a necropocalypse, because we have no basis for knowing how such a thing would work.  In the classic source material, zombies are more or less magical and not apparantly bound to anything real.  Moreover, one of the core assumptions of the source material is that zombies succeed in spreading effectively.  But its fairly certain that a real zombie outbreak would be constrained by actual reality, and would not have the 'power of plot' to simply spread just because it makes a compelling story.  My personal feeling is that people are vastly underestimating just how dangerous humans are and vastly overestimating how dangerous more or less mindless, shambling, corpses would actually be once the initial surprise 'round' is over.  Likewise, I think that they are vastly overestimating how long the initial surprise phase would last.  Probably it wouldn't be longer than a few hours.  There would be a 'fog of war' phase of confusion for anyone removed from the immediate vicinity of the event, but for people in it, I think they'd adapt far faster than they would in movies.  Humanity is far hardier than is generally credited, and fear is a powerful motivator which tends to be more useful than not.  Screaming paniced hysterics is not the rule outside of B-movies.  I don't think the zombies would stand a chance, and the only scenarios where I think humanity is in trouble are those where the contagion is more like a virulent contagion.  In which case, the zombies are just a nuisance and the real problem is the contagion.</blockquote>

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