It would certainly have massive philosophical implications. I would hope it turned out like District 9 but would more likely be some terraforming operation to kill us all and use our planet.
Jesus Christ I fucking hate District 9. The camera work and sets and everything was pretty cool, but the plot was so fucking stupid... seriously, these goddamn prawns are basically gypsies who got kicked out of their own civilization for being useless, in fact they're so fucking useless that they have weapons that turn living matter into ground beef and Iron Man-tier exosuits, and they let themselves get herded into a refugee camp and eat cat food and get fucked by roaming gangs of niggers... and I'm supposed to sympathize with them? And then they all get saved by A FUCKING WHITE MALE, and the whole thing is apparently supposed to tell me Apartheid was bad?!
And then a few years later, Elysium. It's not even ham-fisted like District 9 was, it's beating you with an entire pig carcass. The rich are exploiting Matt Damon and holy shit who cares. And then in the end, the poor oppressed manage to get medical supplies from Elysium to the planet, and... and then WHAT?! Now everyone's out of supplies, well fucking done, you've postponed your deaths by a fucking month!
I can never take the South African accent seriously. Since Lethal Weapon 2 it's been my go to mockery. "Who is the dickhead now, hey?" can only be said in South African accent.
It likely isn't. If they're smart enough to be part of an invasion force, they're likely smart enough to just look like twitch thots and take over the world culturally through the inherent value simps give women.
Zombie apocalypse. It's the easiest one to survive in. Just push the zombies the hell over and you win. The apocalypse will be finished before it's begun. Seriously, zombies are the stupidest monsters ever. Take away a human's brainpower and physical strength by putting them into a state of constant decay, and they're fucking harmless. They won't even be able to freaking walk! And within three days, they'll be too dehydrated to even twitch.
But I guess if we're operating under the assumption that all these scenarios are being played straight, then I'll go for alien invasion. There's always a chance they might be harmless or benevolent. Or heck, maybe they'll be willing to reward the humans that will help them round up the worthless rabble. There are a lot of those to be found in the big cities, particularly in California and New York.
It depends on the exact type of zombies. Are they the usual shambling ones, or super aggressive runners like in Left for Dead or World War Z? Does the contagion spread only through bites, or is it airborne? Maybe they could be the type of supernatural zombies that don't just fall apart after a while but last forever and can walk between continents through the deep ocean, even if it takes them a long time?
Of course, alien invasion would depend on the type of aliens too. Are they aliens who just discovered something we never did, took a road we never did, and so they can travel between the stars, but they do it in basically 17th century galleons while fighting with flintlock guns, like in this incredible story? (PDF warning) And then they land on Earth, thinking they'll conquer it just like a myriad other worlds, and get assfucked by supersonic jets the and Marines using automatic rifles? Or maybe they're like the aliens in Mars Attacks!, and you can defeat them by playing folk music? Or maybe they're like the aliens in The Three Body Problem, and (spoiler alert) we're just fucked with absolutely no chance to fight back in any meaningful way?
Someone mastering interstellar travel is pretty much a requirement for any alien invasion scenario. (Okay, unless they're like from Mars or Europa.) But seriously, check out the short story in the link above, it's great. It's about an alien invasion with flintlock guns.
Seriously, zombies are the stupidest monsters ever
That's because almost every piece of zombie media is being an allegory for some bullshit, and the one's that aren't are still using the setup from those that are.
Which is why they never have anything deeper than "humans are the real monsters" to say.
Zombie movies exist because people wanted to make natural disaster movies where you could delay or speed up the disaster whenever the plot called for it, without ruining suspension of disbelief, and in Sharknado, shooting the tornado looked stupid, so it's just easier to shoot zombies.
Zombie movie plot points and hurricane movie plot points are the exact same: Everyone's happy, suddenly bad stuff happens, gotta get medical supplies, someone was injured in a way we can't heal so we gotta euthanize them, main leads have romantic subplot.
Humanity would recover from 2 for the better, IMO. 3 is just too unknown and humanity might be wiped out for good. 4 is literal hell. 1 is a lot of work... like running from zombies and trying to survive all the time... ugh. I'd rather it just be one and done like a nuclear Armageddon so we can immediately get on with the rebuilding process.
I think you've hit on the point I was trying to infer. And that is even with the horrors of the first 3 , we'd still all pick them ahead of the absolute nightmare that Number 4 Would be.
1 and 3 are clear and obvious threats that need to be met with lethal force, almost without question. Further, the sides are drawn up clearly without much of any gray. Humanity would, in all likelihood, be "generally" united, at least against said threats (in-fighting will always be a risk, such as it is to be human).
Nuclear Armageddon. It's vastly overhyped. It will raise incidence of cancer for a few generations, but then life will go on much as it does now, only with far fewer niggers.
Depends how far the Armageddon goes. If it hits nuclear winter tiers of Armageddon, thats going to have some pretty serious ecological damage worldwide.
That's the thing. Nuclear winter is BS. It cannot happen. We detonated over 2000 nukes in the atmosphere, and temperature was unaffected. detonating 10 times as much will still have no effect. Large eruptions like Pinatubo can barely lower the temperature 2 degrees. Nuclear winter is not a thing.
A nuclear winter is caused by ash produced by breaking things, such as the destruction of several cities. The nukes themselves do not directly cause the phenomenon.
There have been a combined total of 540,000 kt of nuclear explosions across 2500 tests. Sedan was a shallow buried 110 kt explosion that excavated 11,000,000 tons of material. There are currently around 3000 deployed nuclear weapons. Assuming that ALL detonations in an nuclear exchange were buried to maximize material excavated, (an insane assumption) they would excavate around 5x10^10 tons of material. That is on the same order of magnitude of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which ejected 1.1x10^10 tons of material.
Global temperatures dropped by about 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) in the years 1991–1993
Even if we assumed that 5 times the material gives a 5 times the reduction in temperature (it doesn't, see the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815), that is still only 2 degrees.
Nuclear winter is pure fear mongering. It does not exist.
I'm severely overestimating it. Most of the nukes would be airburst, and their fireballs would never make contact with the ground. The shockwaves are what cause the damage, not the radiation.
Nuclear winter has little to do with radiation and more to do with ash. It operates on a similar principle to the concept of the volcanic winter. You start nuking common western cities filled with skyscrapers you are going to end up with incredible amounts of debris being shoved into the atmosphere and the sheer amount of ash is going to be a problem
Zombies is simple: Learn quickly, establish local order, pre-emptively shoot anyone who things cloth masks stop the zombie virus, and just move on with life having one additional human-hostile predator on earth. Fast or slow, they're slower than brown bears, and bears can take several bullets to the head, we deal with those just fine.
Nuclear is an oddity, because "armageddon" can mean multiple things. How long will the nuclear winter be? Every capital, or every major city, or random bombardment? But a decent chance exists to pick yourself back up.
Aliens either want humans gone, or don't. No agency on my part, it's a weighted coin flip. Their morality will seem foreign to us even if they let us live, but...
Not as foreign as #4, which delights in reality-denial and science-denial. Remember, local left-wing tinpots have done such things as declared that saying "2+2=4" is racist and/or sexist, and should be punishable by law. Remove all signs of the past that disagree with the present. Change the present daily. If they had the power to make those laws... All progress, gone. All proof of our existence, gone.
Ok depending on the answer for this, so long as they aren't either some mutant umbrella/dying light zombie or the film World War Z tidal waves, I'll go zombie apocalypse
Because then I can hold up in a castle and I'm good, those naturally keep that kind of threat out
leftist totalian world government. It beats having to shoot the corpse of my dead friends, or being glassed in an instant. in a cyberpunk dystopia, at least I can live and find purpose in being a rebel.
Aliens! I’m definitely dead in 1/2 and they’d eventually find out I have doubts about the legitimacy of “non-binary” identity so I’d be executed for wrong think under 4. (I have a lot of other doubts about lefty orthodoxy but non-binary strikes me as the most obviously fake and gay bit of it.) But option 3 doesn’t necessarily entail human extinction. You never know, anyway, maybe they just want to colonize us, not wipe us out.
Easy mode: Alien Invasion. An alien invasion would quickly render the marxists and world financial powers meaningless, uniting the race to fight back or die.
Normal mode: Zombie Apocalypse. They are simply the undead, and the undead can be tricked. And even if the dead outnumber the living, you can still survive if you're smart about it
Hard mode: A leftist totalitarian world government is a difficult enemy that seeks to control everything. However, they can be fought back against - and without american taxpayer dollars funding them, their powers rapidly collapse. The fight's gonna be a lot harder, though.
Lunatic mode: Nuclear Armageddon. Unless you were well-prepared ahead of time with a budget of a few billion dollars, and willing to live deep underground for years, you're a goner.
I think Nuke in the Northern Hemisphere would be close to impossible without a radsuit and Radaway or Rad-X. (iodine?). Southern Hemisphere should be easier. I actually live in a state that had nuclear tests, apart from my extra limbs I haven't noticed anything.
Zombie Apocalypse. I call dibs on Angel Island on the SF Bay. I live next to a marina and work near another one. I already have get away boats picked out.
If aliens show up and they're not the "we come in peace - here's the design for all sorts of cool stuff" type they're just going to exterminate us.
Nuclear Armageddon and World Government seem about equal in the grim outcome territory. One will probably bring about the other.
Aliens arrive. We need a world government to fight them off. But the war with the aliens leads to Nuclear Armageddon and then for laughs everyone left is in the zombie apocalypse. Then choose your Deux Ex Machina. Jesus comeback tour? Asteroid? Time Travel? Transcendental Object at the End of Time?
if you survive you probably get some really cool tech out of it
People have seen zombies? Biden doesn't count.
I think we do better against zombies than aliens.
If you want to see some IRL zombies, just open youtube and search for "Kensington Avenue". Crazy shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1Kf-1qd6Y
That's a good take. I do like the idea of killing zombies though.
Alien invasion
It would certainly have massive philosophical implications. I would hope it turned out like District 9 but would more likely be some terraforming operation to kill us all and use our planet.
Jesus Christ I fucking hate District 9. The camera work and sets and everything was pretty cool, but the plot was so fucking stupid... seriously, these goddamn prawns are basically gypsies who got kicked out of their own civilization for being useless, in fact they're so fucking useless that they have weapons that turn living matter into ground beef and Iron Man-tier exosuits, and they let themselves get herded into a refugee camp and eat cat food and get fucked by roaming gangs of niggers... and I'm supposed to sympathize with them? And then they all get saved by A FUCKING WHITE MALE, and the whole thing is apparently supposed to tell me Apartheid was bad?!
And then a few years later, Elysium. It's not even ham-fisted like District 9 was, it's beating you with an entire pig carcass. The rich are exploiting Matt Damon and holy shit who cares. And then in the end, the poor oppressed manage to get medical supplies from Elysium to the planet, and... and then WHAT?! Now everyone's out of supplies, well fucking done, you've postponed your deaths by a fucking month!
yes Elysium was retarded.
I thought District 9 was a comedy - nothing more.
It was an expertly made farce, but it wasn't supposed to be, it was meant to be super deeeeeeeeeep.
I can never take the South African accent seriously. Since Lethal Weapon 2 it's been my go to mockery. "Who is the dickhead now, hey?" can only be said in South African accent.
That's nothing, you should hear mine. I'm Czech, but when I speak English, people think I'm Russian. EEEZ FINE!
As far as native English speakers go, New Zealanders have the craziest accent I've ever heard.
You are probably right unfortunately
I for one welcome our new overlords from the planet Amazonia.
Lets say they can shapeshift and be whatever you want.
Galaxy Quest style, huh?
It likely isn't. If they're smart enough to be part of an invasion force, they're likely smart enough to just look like twitch thots and take over the world culturally through the inherent value simps give women.
Zombie apocalypse. It's the easiest one to survive in. Just push the zombies the hell over and you win. The apocalypse will be finished before it's begun. Seriously, zombies are the stupidest monsters ever. Take away a human's brainpower and physical strength by putting them into a state of constant decay, and they're fucking harmless. They won't even be able to freaking walk! And within three days, they'll be too dehydrated to even twitch.
But I guess if we're operating under the assumption that all these scenarios are being played straight, then I'll go for alien invasion. There's always a chance they might be harmless or benevolent. Or heck, maybe they'll be willing to reward the humans that will help them round up the worthless rabble. There are a lot of those to be found in the big cities, particularly in California and New York.
It depends on the exact type of zombies. Are they the usual shambling ones, or super aggressive runners like in Left for Dead or World War Z? Does the contagion spread only through bites, or is it airborne? Maybe they could be the type of supernatural zombies that don't just fall apart after a while but last forever and can walk between continents through the deep ocean, even if it takes them a long time?
Of course, alien invasion would depend on the type of aliens too. Are they aliens who just discovered something we never did, took a road we never did, and so they can travel between the stars, but they do it in basically 17th century galleons while fighting with flintlock guns, like in this incredible story? (PDF warning) And then they land on Earth, thinking they'll conquer it just like a myriad other worlds, and get assfucked by supersonic jets the and Marines using automatic rifles? Or maybe they're like the aliens in Mars Attacks!, and you can defeat them by playing folk music? Or maybe they're like the aliens in The Three Body Problem, and (spoiler alert) we're just fucked with absolutely no chance to fight back in any meaningful way?
You'd have to start from the assumption they have mastered interstellar travel and the technological ramifications of that.
Someone mastering interstellar travel is pretty much a requirement for any alien invasion scenario. (Okay, unless they're like from Mars or Europa.) But seriously, check out the short story in the link above, it's great. It's about an alien invasion with flintlock guns.
I enjoyed the story. But It's a highly unlikely tech tree.
I like the ending. "What have we done?"
Then again I unironically enjoy (some) HFY copypastas.
That's because almost every piece of zombie media is being an allegory for some bullshit, and the one's that aren't are still using the setup from those that are.
Which is why they never have anything deeper than "humans are the real monsters" to say.
Zombie movies exist because people wanted to make natural disaster movies where you could delay or speed up the disaster whenever the plot called for it, without ruining suspension of disbelief, and in Sharknado, shooting the tornado looked stupid, so it's just easier to shoot zombies.
Zombie movie plot points and hurricane movie plot points are the exact same: Everyone's happy, suddenly bad stuff happens, gotta get medical supplies, someone was injured in a way we can't heal so we gotta euthanize them, main leads have romantic subplot.
I think you've hit on the point I was trying to infer. And that is even with the horrors of the first 3 , we'd still all pick them ahead of the absolute nightmare that Number 4 Would be.
Yes I'd take all of the first three combined before I'd take #4.
And yet we still don't fight to stop it.
1 and 3 are clear and obvious threats that need to be met with lethal force, almost without question. Further, the sides are drawn up clearly without much of any gray. Humanity would, in all likelihood, be "generally" united, at least against said threats (in-fighting will always be a risk, such as it is to be human).
Can't confidently say the same in #4.
Alien Invasion!! We get spaceships, advanced tech, and more!
Only if you can form XCOM beforehand!
Or if you can teach Randy Quaid to fly an F/A-18. Then you get a sequel that's like AIDS on a screen.
Zombies. Destroys blue population centers just as effectively as a nuke, but isn't radioactive afterwards.
Besides that all that really changes is that you have to cut people's heads off when they die.
Yeah there'd definitely be a kill rate divided down political lines
Zombie Apocalypse. Survival rate is a lot higher, both in the beginning and years down the road. The world can be rebuilt.
We won't survive an Alien Invasion. The fact that they can even reach us just shows that they're far more technologically superior.
I would rather die than live through a Nuclear Armageddon.
I would rather survive a Nuclear Armageddon than live in a Leftist Totalitarian World Government.
Nuclear Armageddon. It's vastly overhyped. It will raise incidence of cancer for a few generations, but then life will go on much as it does now, only with far fewer niggers.
Honestly, this. I live in a pretty inconsequential city, and if someone nuked my country's capital, I'd be thankful forever.
Only hopefully no super mutants or Radscorpions.
Depends how far the Armageddon goes. If it hits nuclear winter tiers of Armageddon, thats going to have some pretty serious ecological damage worldwide.
That's the thing. Nuclear winter is BS. It cannot happen. We detonated over 2000 nukes in the atmosphere, and temperature was unaffected. detonating 10 times as much will still have no effect. Large eruptions like Pinatubo can barely lower the temperature 2 degrees. Nuclear winter is not a thing.
A nuclear winter is caused by ash produced by breaking things, such as the destruction of several cities. The nukes themselves do not directly cause the phenomenon.
You don't understand.
There have been a combined total of 540,000 kt of nuclear explosions across 2500 tests. Sedan was a shallow buried 110 kt explosion that excavated 11,000,000 tons of material. There are currently around 3000 deployed nuclear weapons. Assuming that ALL detonations in an nuclear exchange were buried to maximize material excavated, (an insane assumption) they would excavate around 5x10^10 tons of material. That is on the same order of magnitude of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which ejected 1.1x10^10 tons of material.
Even if we assumed that 5 times the material gives a 5 times the reduction in temperature (it doesn't, see the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815), that is still only 2 degrees.
Nuclear winter is pure fear mongering. It does not exist.
I think you are severely underestimating the amount of ash and debris that would be put into the air from several dozen cities
I'm severely overestimating it. Most of the nukes would be airburst, and their fireballs would never make contact with the ground. The shockwaves are what cause the damage, not the radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)
Nuclear winter has little to do with radiation and more to do with ash. It operates on a similar principle to the concept of the volcanic winter. You start nuking common western cities filled with skyscrapers you are going to end up with incredible amounts of debris being shoved into the atmosphere and the sheer amount of ash is going to be a problem
Your numbering is my numbered priority list.
Zombies is simple: Learn quickly, establish local order, pre-emptively shoot anyone who things cloth masks stop the zombie virus, and just move on with life having one additional human-hostile predator on earth. Fast or slow, they're slower than brown bears, and bears can take several bullets to the head, we deal with those just fine.
Nuclear is an oddity, because "armageddon" can mean multiple things. How long will the nuclear winter be? Every capital, or every major city, or random bombardment? But a decent chance exists to pick yourself back up.
Aliens either want humans gone, or don't. No agency on my part, it's a weighted coin flip. Their morality will seem foreign to us even if they let us live, but...
Not as foreign as #4, which delights in reality-denial and science-denial. Remember, local left-wing tinpots have done such things as declared that saying "2+2=4" is racist and/or sexist, and should be punishable by law. Remove all signs of the past that disagree with the present. Change the present daily. If they had the power to make those laws... All progress, gone. All proof of our existence, gone.
You have the darkest take. kudos.
You put zombie apocalypse twice 👀
Provided I know ahead of time it's coming? 2. I live close enough to the boonies that I could get away from any targets.
1324
3 depends on the aliens. I would say 1 since everybody knows how to handle zombies now. 2 only if I was way out in the boonies.
Ok depending on the answer for this, so long as they aren't either some mutant umbrella/dying light zombie or the film World War Z tidal waves, I'll go zombie apocalypse
Because then I can hold up in a castle and I'm good, those naturally keep that kind of threat out
Yeah I've probably played too much Fallout with Rose Coloured glasses as well. ;)
Dark...but fair.
Never say die.
Aliens, or functional equivalent. If they're here to eat humans, they'll be culling the Asians first.
I hear there's another congressional UAP hearing or something coming up in a couple days?
leftist totalian world government. It beats having to shoot the corpse of my dead friends, or being glassed in an instant. in a cyberpunk dystopia, at least I can live and find purpose in being a rebel.
Until they take you away for "re-education"
They'd never take me alive
Aliens! I’m definitely dead in 1/2 and they’d eventually find out I have doubts about the legitimacy of “non-binary” identity so I’d be executed for wrong think under 4. (I have a lot of other doubts about lefty orthodoxy but non-binary strikes me as the most obviously fake and gay bit of it.) But option 3 doesn’t necessarily entail human extinction. You never know, anyway, maybe they just want to colonize us, not wipe us out.
Technically the first 3 could all be number 4
Easy mode: Alien Invasion. An alien invasion would quickly render the marxists and world financial powers meaningless, uniting the race to fight back or die.
Normal mode: Zombie Apocalypse. They are simply the undead, and the undead can be tricked. And even if the dead outnumber the living, you can still survive if you're smart about it
Hard mode: A leftist totalitarian world government is a difficult enemy that seeks to control everything. However, they can be fought back against - and without american taxpayer dollars funding them, their powers rapidly collapse. The fight's gonna be a lot harder, though.
Lunatic mode: Nuclear Armageddon. Unless you were well-prepared ahead of time with a budget of a few billion dollars, and willing to live deep underground for years, you're a goner.
I think Nuke in the Northern Hemisphere would be close to impossible without a radsuit and Radaway or Rad-X. (iodine?). Southern Hemisphere should be easier. I actually live in a state that had nuclear tests, apart from my extra limbs I haven't noticed anything.
Zombie Apocalypse. I call dibs on Angel Island on the SF Bay. I live next to a marina and work near another one. I already have get away boats picked out.
If aliens show up and they're not the "we come in peace - here's the design for all sorts of cool stuff" type they're just going to exterminate us.
Nuclear Armageddon and World Government seem about equal in the grim outcome territory. One will probably bring about the other.
Aliens arrive. We need a world government to fight them off. But the war with the aliens leads to Nuclear Armageddon and then for laughs everyone left is in the zombie apocalypse. Then choose your Deux Ex Machina. Jesus comeback tour? Asteroid? Time Travel? Transcendental Object at the End of Time?
Def Aliens.
There's a reason World of Darkness regrets creating the Ka Luon.
Only one doesn't require me to share a space with or side with my enemy.
Has to be #1.
As long as they don't make it to their bunkers first.