Is the human race able to survive Cataclysm?

[Love_osu]

In the post-apocalypse world, there are well trained warriors, marksman, super soldiers, strong mutants, near-unkillable cyborgs with cutting edge weaponry,etc.
If humans somehow manage to unite and fight the common enemy, than I think we have hope. Our combat potential is more than enough to reconquer Earth main land.
The ocean is another problem, though.

[mlangsdorf]

You do realize that “strong mutants” are effectively involuntarily sleeper agents for the Blob? Your mutant army is not going to drive the Blob away from the Earth.

[Erk]

Even if strong mutants weren’t literally powered by the blob already, and every human in your elite force didn’t have blob in their system, there’s no way an elite force of a couple hundred people are going to eradicate a million zombies each. What do they do when these few hundred survivors are faced with a force of a thousand skeletal juggernauts backed up by a hundred necromancers and a dozen masters, with corrosive zombies, smokers, and grapplers for support? The idea that a handful of people would be able to retake an undead continent is insane and I’m not sure why people keep confidently asserting it should be no problem.

[crazykiddeath]

I don’t think anyone has been saying it would be easy, or fast or anything of the sort. I know I didn’t say that, I literally described a total regearing of society into as total war a state as the world has ever seen.

As for how you fight a force like that? You grow your numbers over decades and fight a war of attrition, It would require a rethinking of how a battle is fought. Since there are a limited number of bodies for the blob to possess, everytime one of those is ruined beyond use there is one less enemy. That and preventing the blob from gaining fresh bodies would becoming a key factor in any tactics going forward, mandated destruction of fresh bodies, avoidence of pitch battles, weapons that destroy the body out right, etc.
Humans aren’t technically limited in the same way, with enough time you can breed more humans.

That’s ignoring the whole “dead world” scenario however.

[harison86]

A war of attrition versus an enemy with more expendable bodies than you 1000 to 1, that grows stronger over time, that has virtually no upkeep, that has nearly all the land and even water on Earth under its control? A war of attrition versus that?

[crazykiddeath]

There are a limited number of bodies, there has to be an upper limit of how strong they can get unless they literally end up invincible. I actually already addressed that above.

[Sticker]

I’m fairly sure that, according to the design document, the blob has infected the world through the water supplies. It is in all of the water. That makes it impossible to prevent the blob from integrating other life.

It is already omnipresent. The blob is in the water people drink and no amount of purification or boiling or filtering will change that. ,
The blob will be in the children that theoretically could be conceived and birthed, regardless of how unlikely childrearing in the cataclysm is.

Unless somebody has a nearly endless supply of uninfected water to support a group with, there is no prevention of new bodies for the blob.

[crazykiddeath]

Well if they can control live people we are falling into the “poor writing” trap, since you have to ask, why didn’t they just do that to begin with?

If we can assume they can’t control the living directly then it being in the water doesn’t really matter.

[nameless_survivor]

Kevin said blister agents (a category of chemical weapon) would work on zombies. That would be a major force multiplier for any defensive or offensive force. And the best part is these agents are fairly easy to manufacture. Speaking as an engineer, many commercial chemical plants could be re-tooled fairly easily to make a number of chemical weapons in bulk, and as I detailed in the linked discussion above, can even be made in your kitchen. Combined with conventional indirect fire support from artillery or mortar batteries to mutilate the corpses and deal with large numbers of enemies, you could definitely deal with massive hordes.

Using chemical weapons would also make retaking cities MUCH easier. Gas the city, or a portion of it, and then move in to destroy the corpses before they can revive. And if for some reason you cannot take a city using chemical weapons, carpet bomb it into dust or nuke it, then pick off any zombies that survive or revive as they emerge from the rubble with conventional forces supported by chemical weapons.

Unless somebody has a nearly endless supply of uninfected water to support a group with, there is no prevention of new bodies for the blob.

Make decapitation and cremation mandatory on death. All soldiers or defensive forces should carry a grenade or other explosive device that can be quickly activated, instructed to only use it in case they are overwhelmed. This way the only human bodies that would revive as zombie reinforcements are those who die alone and don’t manage to self destruct.

[Mantar]

I always figured that it’s possible to “reproduce” with a mutant provided they haven’t crossed a threshold. At that point, they’ve speciated and can no longer breed with anything that’s not also past their threshold.
Otherwise, you get weird, possibly non-viable babies, but there’s at least a possibility.

A good analogy would be complaining about the Lovecraft Mythos because humanity can’t do anything to stop Azathoth from waking up.

That’s a pretty good analogy for what’s happening in this thread, actually, since August Derleth seemingly didn’t like the bleakness of the mythos and basically redid a lot of things so that mankind has a fighting chance against the vast, unknowable, and uncaring multi-layered cosmos. Which fundamentally changes the character of the stories if you accept his additions – it becomes more Adventure and less Horror.

[Trigon]

Yeah. I don’t think humanity can retake the Earth under any circumstances. My main argument is that the species could survive in theory, though most likely in isolation, living under the radar as best they can while abominations duke it out.

[Halosammy]

And that’s when the Mythos got diluted into an urban fantasy setting. So yeah. The writers should just do their thing here and not give in to pressure.

[latogato]

When i started to play CDDA years ago, it was clear to me, this is an end of the world scenario. That time there was less type of items and monsters and the player was underarmed. Later the combat items became so overpowered the player could rule the world. I’m not suprised people think we could win. Nowadays the game is more balanced, except the cars. Every single time i able to find a working car within few hours.

p.s.: i miss acid rains and the destructive beam of the flaming eyes…

[Mantar]

Oh yeah, people get mad about the fungal infection these days, but I still remember casually walking around a house, looking through the loot, unaware that the portal out back had spawned a flaming eye until it noticed me and stared, punching a burning hole of red laser death all the way through the house to get me. I escaped, but was badly wounded and just marked that town as off limits, because those things were serious bad news.

We’ll just bring the nether creature across directly into the containment cell, and keep it there for study

NO YOU WON’T

[latogato]

Once a flaming eye stared at me while i drove across a zombie infested town. The beam broke up the road, destroyed my controls and i crashed into an abandoned van. I hid behind the van but it just punched a hole through it with its stare. The noises attracted the zombies so i ran into the closest house to lose them. It collapsed on me twice before i finally got far away from that damn flaming eye.

[Minecrafter_Next_Gen]

Thankfully, Flaming Eyes no longer shoot lasers.

[Trigon]

Yeah. I think my first flaming eye death had me on a bicycle. I was peddling by wondering what that thing was and deciding to just avoid it. Apparently it had seen me so it just erased me and the bike from existence.

[OneStar]

The whole mutants breeding is actually fairly possible if mutations don’t cause Infertility or destroy sex organs, because your eggs/sperm are created from cells that were made when you were a baby and ONLY are copies of the DNA you’re born with, and your eggs/sperm will ONLY be copies of your birth DNA without modification plus females are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have ., so that’s why you can’t get a testicle transplant and not have another man’s children Is how I know this to be.

[mlangsdorf]

You’re assuming that XE-037 mutations work like normal genetic drift mutations. Since they obviously don’t work that way for gross physical changes, I don’t think you can assume that for hereditary.

[Reinhark]

Humanity as we know it would come to an end. We can be pretty sure that with continued purifier treatment and no interference with Blob… with addition of existing human tech(external womb from the lab + current era tech of artificial fertilization), we can “Survive” in the long term assuming new earth and/or human aggression does not kill off all humans.

Hopefully in hundred year or so. surviving members of human race can agree to not kill each other(to a degree we do currently).
As long as humanity do not aggro Blob with excessive pollution or such, I am certain that we can advance enough to a degree.

Prospects against the Blob assuming humanity survive and create technological society once again:
Pretty sure those things took over all life on Earth as we know it. Their goal seems to be planet itself and they seems to be done with it now. “Winning the planet from the Blob” would necessitate elimination of all life on earth. Plus entire race will risk wrath from the transdimensional alien. This is considered to be some people to be counter-productive. I would agree with this.

Since earth cannot be re-taken, Either:
Co-existence with Blob should be accepted for humanity’s continued existence.
Get out of Earth.

Both is viable option. There are other option to remove Blob from this planet but it is either stupid, end humanity as we know it, or stupidly end humanity as we know it.