10 Thoughts About Zombies.

1. I'm watching Season 4 of The Walking Dead, on Netflix DVDs.  I'm starting to have doubts about the show once again.  In episode 2, they kill the sick piglets to lure the walkers away from the fence that's about to break.  It may seem like a perfect compromise, but in the end it was a waste of food.  They could have killed the sick piglets for meals by chopping the heads off, and roasting them.  They could have lured the walkers away from just the noise of driving around, killing them along the way.
2. Oh, and while I'm on the second episode, let me guess the plot for the season: Dealing with a traitors and treacherous actions in the midst and everlasting tribal dissension -- in other words, the continued story of man on man war, even in the face of total extinction.  I tend to think that, were humans to truly face extinction, we'd cooperate and come to an understanding that war against each other was verboten; that if we came to a disagreement, we'd either split our differences to reach a compromise or otherwise split into separate groups and keep to ourselves.
3. One last thing about TWD: It seems that when a main character goes off into a soliloquy and gets more focus, it spells their impending death -- I guess it's a writer's flaw, to want to give a character greater meaning the moments before their death.
4. Speaking of zombies, World War Z, the movie, is significantly different than the book.  The thing about the movie that drove me nuts, was that the zombies could physically move faster than the humans they once were, which is a physical impossibility.  Even if you had the capacity to ignore pain, you couldn't make your legs move faster when you're holding the same weight and limited to the same muscle structure as when you were alive; eventually you'd break all your ligaments and your legs could not move at all.  In the book, zombies did not move that fast.
5. If you really want to survive a zombie apocalypse, where would you go?  Well, I've already visited that scenario before.  Zombies cannot physically exceed the capacities of human physiology, so no matter what, no zombie can climb a ship's side that is anchored offshore.
6. If you are ingenious enough, you can use solar heating to distill salt water into fresh water.  Scaling it would require considerable ingenuity, but you're not trying to feed the thirst of thousands.  But consider the alternative of having to find large storage, and then transporting that water to your storage, as well as the issue of the quality of water.
7. Aside from fresh water, then the next critical thing you need is food.  Dehydrated food would work extremely well in the short term, but it's not self-sustaining.  You need fresh food which means that you need seeds to make plants.  Three months' dried food supply only gets you to month four -- you know who I'm talking to -- and if month four should happen to fall between September and February?  It's an ideal amount if you're dealing with a natural disaster, but if there's a deadly viral outbreak that results in societal breakdown, it's completely insufficient.
8. The only way to survive a zombie apocalypse -- aka deadly global viral pandemic -- is to go green.  That means using solar cells, solar heating, electrically-powered devices, etc.  Power generators require fuel and you'll probably need to go out to find fuel over time, on a regular basis.  Candles require replenishment of candles.
9. Don't worry about saving humankind's knowledge...it's already saved on -- generally speaking -- Google's servers.  If the viral pandemic passes, servers can be rebooted, while in the meantime that data is saved on a semi-permanent basis on those hard drives.
10. I leave you with one unanswered question in all zombie movies: What happens if you artificially inseminate a human female with zombie sperm?