Unrealistic self sufficiency

i think the usual response to that is - they are staying out of the cities due to rotting bodies, and all else has been scavenged.
weak , but....

what did you think of the 2nd series? i'm about to start on that but i heard its not as good as the first

the problem with the idea that the cities were unihabitable due to rotting corpses is that within a few months, certainly within a year, insects and birds and such would have eaten all the dead bodies.

Now you may say that packs of dogs would be dangerous, but after the bodies are eaten, what would the dogs eat? THey would starve to death. And even so, with some guns and some cars, the dogs become less of a problem.

People are going to live as easily as they can, and the stuff in the cities represented the easy life.

You may say that bad guys were in the cities, but remember that only about 1 in 1000 people died, and back in those days, pre-mass immigration, how many brits would be criminals? Few.

Bottom line would be that people would be living off the land, but they would be using mostly scavenged stuff.



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I agree with you about the needles but as for food who would want to spend the rest of their life living off old tins of Spam and baked beans? It isn't like they have jobs to go to or anything so they may as well work the land and get some fresh fruit and veg.


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I think it was too dangerous to go to the cities, port areas, and distribution centers because most of the bodies are found there, together with rats, etc. You can see that in a few episodes, esp. the ones involving London and the result of one visit.

There should have been needles, tools, and other items in houses, though.

I've only seen the first couple episodes, but the reason, I believe, is not out of complete need. They may be able to scavenge, but that would only go so far. There are idealistic ideas to rebuild a society and they need to start to be as self sufficient as possible for the long run. They don't want to waste their time scavenging when they could be honing their farming skills, something they can then pass on to the next generation.

Actually according to most historians and archaeologist when people abandon a city or town in the past for any number of reasons they never go back, I lived in a state in the U.S. where there were many ghost towns up in the mountains that had been abandoned. You would see wagons, canned goods etc., it gives you a weird feeling to walk around a deserted town yet you can still see remnants that at one time people lived and flourished there in the past.

As one poster pointed out dead bodies bring whole other batch of diseases not to mention the fact that the virus itself could be laying dormant in a mutated form that they were immune to anymore.

20 Abandoned Cities from Around the World: Deserted Towns and Other Derelict Places - http://bit.ly/Wz7oSs

Some of these are large abandoned cities.

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One good reason they'd want to become self-sufficient fairly quickly that hasn't been touched on in this thread is the fact that pretty much any leftover from the old industrial/consumer society would instantly become a scarce resource. There's not enough manpower or expertise left to generate power or keep machines well-maintained on the level needed to run a modern society, which means that industrial capacity is all but dead. Yes, there's plenty of "stuff" lying around but no-one is making any more of it, and eventually decay and corrosion will set in. Food will go off [EDIT: or be eaten without replenishment], metal tools and machinery will rust, even petrol I recently read will become contaminated naturally.

And where you have scarce resources, you'll inevitably have people trying to control them and willing to fight for that control. You can barely get past episode 2 without Arthur Wormley and co. giving the main characters trouble over the food they try to loot from the supermarket, and willing to execute people who don't comply with Wormley's self-proclaimed authority. You have the people later in series 1 who are willing to kill over the matter of a single tanker of petrol. And so on. Trying to pick over the leftovers of the old world and live that way isn't much fun, even ignoring having to go into dangerous, disease-ridden cities to find the best pickings.

There's also the fact, alluded to, that this way of life isn't sustainable and you can't become complacent upon it. Better to at least try learning the necessary skills whilst you can, than dying because you have to become dependent upon them later on and fail miserably.

I realise that it is many years since this thread was started and quite some time since the last post. I am surprised at how short sighted people are should this have ever become reality. Of course there is a lot of stuff lying around but, in time, and I am talking generations here, it will wear out and what would you do then? Sure you can use sharp stones for cutting but that would be far less effective than an axe and I have no idea what iron ore looks like or how to smelt it. Glass is useful for storage, for stills, to keep houses warm and light but do you know how to make it? Metal ploughs are more efficient, metal bits for harnesses, buckets you can sterilise for your dairy use, cooking and baking utensils - the list goes on. These skills and many others all need to be found and kept unless your descendants return to the stone age. This would only be achievable by people working together and I am not enjoying series 2 and 3 because the reality is it would be unlikely to happen. Terry Nations original book was very interesting and worth reading.