How To (Theoretically) Combat The Cataclysm

[Shopkeeper]

I think it’s mainly because the Blob has effectively already won. Constituent parts of it escaped into the watertable before the Cataclysm and managed to infect just about everything, then signaled the greater gestalt entity that interdimensonally pushed humanity’s shit in via the lab teleporter network.

It’s job for now is done. With a force of zombified native lifeforms numbering in the billions and growing with every death no greater commitment is necessary. Earth is effectively a disputed backwater to the Blob, since its two primary adversaries the Mycus and Triffids are also trying to lay claim to it.

It doesn’t matter if it takes fifty years or five-hundred years the result will likely be the same. The Blob is insidious, it’s everywhere now and the earth can never be cleansed of its influence unless you were to scorch the crust clean off the mantle. And even then, it’d just come back in through one of the opened portals and start the process all over again.

Also, the Blob is constantly tweaking and advancing itself to better fit with the demands placed upon its host. This isn’t just reactive evolution, though it is that, but the brute force computation of a billion tiny computers, a constant directed drive to exploit every advantage.

Just look at the zombie population of the average Catacylsm world after the one or two year mark. Each and every single zombie is far more often then not a highly evolved killing machine capable of slaying the average human without too much fuss and by that point they outnumber us one-hundred-to-one at a minimum. The odds only get worse as time goes on while our numbers dwindle further, and theirs grow greater and deadlier.

[vivat]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:10, topic:13033”]At the moment “man is the real monster” as all the biggest threats in the game are either humans (“DROP THAT ROCK OR I’LL SHOOT”) or made by humans (tank drones).

Only the meanest of zombies can stand up to an unskilled survivor willing to get their hands dirty. Triffids are weaker than zombies and also edible. Fungals burn well and their infections can be cured with known medicine.
Out of the “wild” threats, only jabberwocks and shoggoths are really, really dangerous. And both of those go down to pre-cataclysm firearms or even just a band of spear-wielding militia.

The biggest mid-term danger comes from bandits and mutated bandits. That’s the only thing that can stand up against a band of organized humans so far in the setting.

Then there may be new threats, like mutant diseases, low life expectancy (child born with rot mutation is as good as dead), evolved versions of current enemies, nether invasions, oceans of blob, cataclysmic weather effects, but those aren’t expanded upon at the moment.
So at the moment it looks like Africa on steroids, where you die to malaria or conflict rather than to tigers.[/quote]

i do not advice to eat triffids without cooking.
veggy oil - good
veggy juice - not good.
i drink veggy juice and sometimes knews what i have parasite - what is not good.
check yourself.
cook - and eat. and it will be good.

yes not cooked eadible too but - have antiparasite cure on the ready.

[RedPine]

Earth would never return to “normal” but I’d imagine there would be a few ways to adapt. A handful of humans with good mutations could start meeting up and repopulating the globe, and inbreeding shouldn’t be as big a problem if genes are constantly mutating anyway. Eventually, a band of sufficiently equipped humans could use the same portals everything else uses, and travel to every world that is in the process of being infected. Out of all the worlds being infected, at least a handful surely either have either interplanetary travel to escape the infection or the means to combat it directly.

Worst case scenario, the blob controls the world but doesn’t bother completely exterminating humans, and we build as large a civilization as is possible without getting noticed and continue to aquire and store knowledge. Even with a small labor force, if a civilization can store information long enough it will eventually obtain interplanetary/interdimensional travel, or at least the means of piggybacking off of something else’s interplanetary/interdimensional travel.

The irony is that any newly infected worlds the heavily mutated humans manage to escape to would likely view said humans as disfigured monsters indistinguishable from everything else coming through the portals, and said humans might have a hard time distinguishing between alien “natives” and alien “zombies”+everything else coming through the portals.

[Aabbcc]

If the next world is further along the same way as earth is, then the blob and others would have an even harder time adapting, while humans would have it easier.

Triffids, fungus and horrors you can burninate, the blob you can’t get rid of on earth, but if you achieve space travel you can get rid of it for humanity. It’s massively easier to eliminate parasites in controlled environments than on a planet.

Once humanity is free from it and not on the planet, you can exterminatus earth.

[RedPine]

[quote=“Aabbcc, post:24, topic:13033”]If the next world is further along the same way as earth is, then the blob and others would have an even harder time adapting, while humans would have it easier.

Triffids, fungus and horrors you can burninate, the blob you can’t get rid of on earth, but if you achieve space travel you can get rid of it for humanity. It’s massively easier to eliminate parasites in controlled environments than on a planet.

Once humanity is free from it and not on the planet, you can exterminatus earth.[/quote]

If nukes can’t close the portals, what’s the worst that could happen from using a doomsday asteroid on the portals?*

In all seriousness though, humanity probably wouldn’t kill the invaders - they would hack/sabotage/piggyback or otherwise steal/borrow/appropriate whatever it is that makes them special and figure out how to create something even more dangerous >.< Cybernetic Raptor Zombies, anyone? How about a self replicating fissile goo? Whatever we would build hopefully we would do it AFTER getting off planet!

*Worst case scenario: the energy from the asteroid impact allows portals to spawn throughout the solar system and even on space stations

[Aabbcc]

KKV or nukes aren’t the only ways to exterminatus earth. Chemical methods are viable, or making the planet too unlivable by climate fuckery. Remember the blob can’t quite survive on it’s own in Earth’s dimension unless very close to portals, it needs a meat sack shield, and that meat sack has a limit on what it can survive.

And of course, it doesn’t take away that they could close the portals before KKVing earth, no portals that can mutate, no more problems with the more explodey solutions.

[ApatheticExcuse]

The world population is projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Assuming a worst case scenario and everywhere was as fucked by the Cataclysm as New England we’re left with a 1% total global population after the first five days of 97 million people. Obviously it couldn’t have been that bad everywhere, so the potential survivor population could easily jump upwards dramatically.

This is something I think alot of people forget when talking about these kinds of scenarios. 1% of the current population is still much greater than the total population of the Earth has been for most of it’s history. This pretty much guarantees human survival regardless of whatever happens after the cataclysm, or it least makes a very strong argument for it. Besides this, humanity has repeatedly survived much more devastating things than this particular event IRL.

So if we want to count “winning” the apocalypse as simply not going extinct, then it’s pretty easy.

If we only want to count it as actually eliminating the blob, the fungus, and the triffids, it’s pretty much impossible for the reasons others have listed. Off into space is the best bet.

[Litppunk]

[quote=“Aabbcc, post:26, topic:13033”]KKV or nukes aren’t the only ways to exterminatus earth. Chemical methods are viable, or making the planet too unlivable by climate fuckery. Remember the blob can’t quite survive on it’s own in Earth’s dimension unless very close to portals, it needs a meat sack shield, and that meat sack has a limit on what it can survive.

And of course, it doesn’t take away that they could close the portals before KKVing earth, no portals that can mutate, no more problems with the more explodey solutions.[/quote]

So basically the Halo - flood exterminating plan? I object to the use of this plan for the same reason Master chief and the rest of humanity does. I enjoy living, and will fight the enemy myself if it means not having to be blasted into component molecules just because I am potentially food.