Realistically, how many zombies would you have to kill to get rid of them all?

Dead zombies rise again? Kill all of them.

May be, invent a chemical or potion to turn zombies into men or dead corpse?

Today? Probably about 7 billion… give or take a few million…

@harple, you’re assuming the formerly dead should not be included in the calculation? Are there any zombie experts we can get to weigh in on this?

>>zombies
>>realistically
wat

Does this include dog, cat, goose and horse zombies too?

There are resources we can turn to right here on Fluther for such information. I will summon.

One.
I would kill him so gruesome, so sadistically, so bad, so terrible, that all his fellow zombies would jump en masse from a cliff and kill themselves.
Is that possible…., can zombies commit suicide?

You’re scaring me just a little, big guy, and I’m pretty sure I’m still living….

@JilltheTooth Don’t worry, I am kind-hearted by nature, and I almost frightened myself writing that sentence.

Zombies can only be made from people and can’t reproduce any other way, I’m thinking. Plus is there a life expectancy for a zombie? They using human bodies, I wouldn’t think they’d last forever.

It doesn’t matter, the zombies aren’t the problem. The problem is the psycho humans your left with. That’s whose gonna get you.

Hiding under the bed, now.

Did someone hack your account?

The potential number of zombies is less than 7 billion, because if the zombies get most of the humans, then the human society will begin to breakdown and all humans would die out.

The supply of zombies have to be limitless. You fail to understand the trope. Or meme. Myth? Idea? Dream? Sub-diurnal pop motif? Whatever.

Zombies are our darkest fears, exhuming themselves after we thought we’d disposed of them permanently, coming back not just to haunt us, but to devour us. They are relentless and unthinking, demanding and mindless. They are an internal battle that is externalized, and the more guilt and shame and fear and other crap that we don’t like about ourselves there is, the greater a supply of zombies there is.

Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone. Do I see any stones being cast? Then the zombies will resume their relentless rumble endlessly seeking reunification with the source of the evil within you. Indeed, it is you that is eating your own mind, and the more you eat, the more eaters there are to eat. That is the nature of guilt and shame.

If you kill all the humans, there will be no zombies. But as long as there is even one living human, and as long as that human is not Christ or Buddha, there will be as many zombies as needed to destroy the righteous.

There is only one way out of this trap.

There are potentially billions and billions of them and they don’t tend to sit at home watching TV. They all come out looking for flesh and you will probably see five or six zombies in the streets for every human you see today. They do not breathe and so they are capable of travelling underwater for immense distances following shoals of fish. In time they will traverse the ocean to emerge shambling out of the surf in a new continent.

Oh only the one, so long as it was the “queen” of the clan.
The rest would fall like a flimsy pack of cards, rudderless without their menacing matriach.

“realistically” speaking the answer is zero

@wundayata the zombies are not the monster in zombie films. The monsters in zombie films are the humans that are left when society has broken down. The zombies are just visual representation of breakdown of society.

Believe it or not there was a serious book written about this which I highly recommend
http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Diaries-Weight-Survive-Apocalypse/dp/0143117378

The short answer is that you have to kill as many as you can as fast as you can, and you’ll probably lose unless you form an alliance with the vampires.

@Rarebear I foresee one small flaw in that plan…

Well, you can thank the modern burial industry for making things worse. Zombies will rise as long as their bodies hold together enough to function on a zombie level; since we do such a good job of preserving bodies with chemicals and then sealing them into airtight containers, the pool of potential brain eaters has been greatly enlarged.

@syz, this is useful information. So you think we probably don’t have to worry about the undead who were buried before some point in recent history, who have probably decomposed too badly to come after us? It would be helpful to figure out what that cutoff is for the final tally…

Um… @nikipedia , I wouldn’t relax just yet…

@Lightlyseared Well, you’d of course have to turn on the vampires once the zombies are wiped out, but it’s an ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend” decision.

I’m guessing that after the initial outbreak a person might not need to kill many zombies at all. Find a good spot to hold up in, and let mother nature clean up the mess.

It all depends on the rate of decay. Let’s assume that zombies decompose at the same speed as a normal corpse. Yes, embalmed corpses can last decades, but that’s in a sealed vault. How long would a corpse last when exposed to the elements? That length of time would be drastically reduced if animals or insects could feed upon the undead. The common house fly population would explode and would greatly increase the rate of undead decay. I’m guessing the entire thing would be over within 12 months.

Only the last one.

All of them

Since Zombies create more Zombies in a remarkably short time, in the span of a day you could theoretically go from one to a million or more.
That is figuring that a human killed by a zombie becomes a zombie within ½ hour. I don’t know if there is an official time on that.

It all depends on what kind of zombies we’re dealing with here. The living zombies, as in those we see in such movies as 28 Days Later and Zombieland, are much more aggressive and faster, but also much easier to kill and could actually be cured, which would obviously reduce the number of zombies. However, transmission is still easier among the living when you take into account the possibility of carriers and selective immunity immune to bites but not to blood, for example. Dead zombies are harder to kill, but are generally accepted to be less of a threat as they are slower and decomposing.

Then, there is the actual disease to consider. One factor you failed to mention is the possibility that all humans are already infected and once they die, even from non-zombie related causes they will rise again. Obviously, the number of zombies one needs to kill depends a lot on this.

I would maskerade as a zombie, acting as they do blending in, and I would open them up and place remote bombs in them while we were in a big crowd. After enough, I would call for a chopper out and blow them all up.

*Read The Below While Listening To This!
OR, the other alternative, which I prefer would be to capture some of them, have some method of streaming audio/video to the hordes, and torture the zombies in the msot guesome ways possible, making sure every other zombie can hear the screams of error and pain from their fellow kind, these immages etched into what is left of their conciusness, ethriving them with such utter fear and hopelessness that they would simply lose the will to not? live.

Let’s say that the physical viability limit for a corpse is about 20 years.

According to my calculations using this counter, about 1,083,640,000 people have died in that time.

In a worst case scenario where all living humans except you, and all viable corpses have become zombies, then you’d have to kill about 8,080,000,000* zombies.

If this is a major concern for you, I’d start circulating petitions for mandatory and retroactive cremation right away!

If about 80,000,000 of the world’s peeps remain human, then each of you would only have to kill about 100 zombies.

*I subtracted 3,640,000 to approximately compensate for corpses that have been rendered nonviable, that are 20 years old or younger.

@Brian1946

I hope you’re appointed as chief of staff of the National Zombie defense committee. lol

I’m no good at math, I just kill shit…my number, all of em.

According to Dr. Logan though, there’s 400,000 zombies for every one human. (humans that are still alive, obviously) This is while considering a full grown zombie apocalypse on global proportions. So I denno the exact number, even had I a rough estimate of how many humans are left everywhere.

I do know we don’t have enough bullets though…icepicks and machetes it is!

@Symbeline

“According to Dr. Logan though, there’s 400,000 zombies for every one human.”

According to one estimate, about 106,000,000,000 humans have ever lived on this planet. This gives a ratio of about 15 zombies for every person. What is (are) the source(s) of the extra 2,799,999,894,000,000 z-peeple?

However, if you feel compelled kill 400K, please feel free to disregard my previous question. ;-)

Logan’s estimate is based on how many humans are left when the outbreak is in its prime, (I figure that when he says we would have had to kill the zombies in the early stages, and that it’s too late now) it doesn’t encompass how many humans there were before. (I don’t know how he figures that one out though, that is, approximately how many people there’s left that haven’t been zombified; LOOPHOLE XD)

Either way though, yes, I do feel duty bound to fuck up that many zombies, if there were that many. :)

I didn’t think the dead could become zombies.

@Symbeline

Perhaps this has already has been done before, but I was thinking it would be ominous for the last humans on earth to think that they’ve killed all the zombies, and then discover that there’s some inconceivably large googol-source of zombies, that they never realized existed until that terribly brief moment of relief.

Oh wait, yeah haha.

But that always happens in zombie movies, anyways. :D Well not really, but kind of.