That's not venison...
Watching E8 now. Just a hunch.
shareAnd the dad will never be buried.
shareand that wasn’t antibiotic medicine. It was Super-Soldier Serum.
share
MovieChat Forums > The Last of Us (2023) Discussion > That's not venison...
What I don't get is the lack of wildlife. There should be no reason for cannibalism. Deer, rabbits, etc. would be thriving in that environment.
shareAgreed. Especially in that area of the country where deer and Pronghorns are everywhere. Unless the fungus is killing them, they would be plentiful for the relatively small amount of people there.
shareIt's actually worse than that. This show succumbs to one of the most common fundamental errors in apocalyptic fiction: if EVERYONE'S dead suddenly, there Would Be No Shortages Of Food.
Or gas. Or vehicles. Or. . .
You get the point.
Ah well. Show's entertaining, so far. The good definitely outweighs the bad, IMHO.
Gas only last a couple of months before turning bad. You can stretch its life with perfectly sealed containers and additive, but that will just give you more months, not years.
shareGas can be good for years rather than months, but you are right that its combustion life isn't finite. It doesn't just stop working, it just stops working as affectively. 2 years would probably be a stretch, but I'll bet you could run a car off gas that had been sealed for 18 months, but it would run poorly.
shareThat's all (essentially) correct. But I was talking about the broader world-building that just about Every one of these shows attempts: 95% of the world DIES, but somehow there's a scarcity of supplies. To such an extent that roaming gangs of Scavengers are a problem.
The idea is ridiculous, and the result of poorly thought out storylines. Period.
Oh for sure. They always show picked over grocery stores, but most warehouses have pallets of shelved dry goods 3 stories high, which never get brought up.
shareThe show doesn't depict a shortage of cars, the problem was to find a working car battery. There's no shortage of gas, the few times they have a working car available they are not wanting for gas at any point, they just take it from random abandoned cars wherever they go. Only problem is they have to do it every hour or so because the gas being degraded/separated.
For food: you seem to forget that an average supermarket gets supplied every day, under normal population most food would run out in a week or so.
Now there are way way less people, but we are talking 20 years here, that's a 1000 times as long, and all the food that's not canned will have wasted already after a few months. Pasta and rice can in theory keep well but not in plastic bags when there's no one around to guard it from vermin. So really even if there are only 10 people left from a town that had 10,000 inhabitants, eating only canned food, they are going to run through the cans from the two supermarkets in that town pretty quickly. Because there was never canned food to feed 10,000 people there to begin with, because most of the food we eat is not from a can. Go to the canned food section in your local supermarket and imagine how long you can survive on only that, even if it's just you.
Sure there are warehouses with more canned food at places, so some communities living close to them can live pretty good, but there's no distribution network, no one will want to share, and modern supply chains try to keep stocks to a minimum.
Short version: nothing you said was correct, and in fact you display a basic misunderstanding of 1) Food storage/supply 2) Rate(s) of consumption 3) Sustainability/renewable resources 4) Common tropes in apocalyptic fiction 5) etc.
Long version: Vice did a pretty good article on this subject, which explains much of this at length:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bm3bpw/heres-how-long-you-could-survive-if-you-got-trapped-in-a-supermarket
Enough water? Really? In my supermarket there are maybe 3-4 pallets worth of water at any given time (granted I live in a country where you can drink the water from the tap).
At 900 liters a piece this gives a max of 3600 liter (of course in reality it would be way less due to hoarding in the initial days of the outbreak, and then the immediate aftermath in which more people are still uninfected)
https://www.emergencykits.com/emergency-water/emergency-drinking-water/aqua-literz-emergency-drinking-water-10-year-pallet-of-75-cases/
Person needs about 1.5-2 liter a day. So would last you about 5 years even in the most optimistic scenario where the supermarket stock is completely untouched after days of panic and hoarding at a time the supply chain was already breaking down.
Then food. Let's take some big supermarket shelves of canned food:
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/products-shelves-chain-supermarket-shopping-local-grocery-store-tinned-goods-cans-bottles-display-sale-hypermarket-177818706.jpg
I estimate about 240 standard tuna-size cans (130gr) per half-shelf. In total there are 8 shelves there so 250*16=3840 cans of fish and meat (and this is me being very generous). Of course they don't include vegetables yet. So let's say you eat two 130 gram cans of fish or meat a day + some cans of vegetables to complete your diet. This is pretty sparse because two cans of tuna are only like 260 kcal.
For one person, 3840 cans should again last you about 3840/2/365=5 years.
So yeah, like I said, with 10 people left on a town of 10,000 people with two supermarkets you're going to run through stuff pretty quickly.
Also are you just ignoring that you were wrong about the gas and the cars?
Sure, I'm bored:
"In my supermarket there are maybe 3-4 pallets worth of water at any given time"
First of all, you can't extrapolate worldwide based on YOUR supermarket. Secondly, water will NEVER be an issue. . .certainly not "bottled water," for cripe's sake. Third, your conclusions about "hoarding" are EXACTLY what I meant, when I said people haven't thought this through (more on this later). Conclusion: you're starting off Very Poorly. But let's continue:
"Then food. Let's take some big supermarket shelves of canned food"
Again, you're looking at ONE source, and making a hilariously inaccurate projection based on that. I won't go into the particulars, because the article I linked does an Excellent job, and you clearly haven't read it. Bottom line: you're Wrong.
In both instances, you seem to be confused about the concept of planning for sustainability. You estimate how many Years of food/water someone would have, as if they wouldn't be planning to put systems in place moving forward, WITHOUT relying on what was left behind. What on earth do you think people have been doing throughout civilization?
I'll repeat, since you seem to have missed it: just about All apocalyptic fiction posits an INCREDIBLY rapid breakdown of civilization, and in parallel, a vanishingly small amount of people. What you and others like you fail to consider is IT DOESN'T MATTER IF PEOPLE WERE "HOARDING." They're ALL GONE NOW. And ALL those resources are still around (food, water, ammo, supplies, etc.) The idea that people would be competing for resources the way that's shown is, clearly, ridiculous.
"Also are you just ignoring that you were wrong about the gas and the cars?"
No, I'm trying to be patient w/your lack of reading comprehension. Go back and look over what I said: "If everyone's dead suddenly; there would be NO SHORTAGES." Not immediately, and if you want to extrapolate to later years, I've explained that above.
Secondly, water will NEVER be an issue. . .certainly not "bottled water," for cripe's sake.-> you are linking me an article of a guy that calculates that... I'm just refuting your article.
DOESN'T MATTER IF PEOPLE WERE "HOARDING." They're ALL GONE NOW. And ALL those resources are still around (food, water, ammo, supplies, etc.)-> yeah spread over a town of 10,000 people with now 9,990 zombies around, a couple in every house. Of course you're gonna go badass fight for a few cans of tuna every day by raiding random houses, but then you are going to die. And again my calculations were not taking into account that hoarding.
So this series plays 20 years in the future, that's when they are food shortages in certain communities (or very bad food in others), which is what you're saying is unrealistic. Not immediately. Also in the series there are no shortages of gas or vehicles, which is what you were alleging as well.
Again, you're looking at ONE source, and making a hilariously inaccurate projection based on that. I won't go into the particulars, because the article I linked does an Excellent job, and you clearly haven't read it. Bottom line: you're Wrong.->it's just an average supermarket shelf man, some supermarkets will be bigger some will be smaller but ballpark average will be something like that.
You estimate how many Years of food/water someone would have, as if they wouldn't be planning to put systems in place moving forward, WITHOUT relying on what was left behind.-> again, didn't see the series? the main characters barely escaped some fascist government quarantine zone/prison. In other areas we see small groups of separate communities that are fighting each other. All the people we see are just surviving, society is completely broken down, they don't have a chance to plan some long term agriculture. Sure, some people manage to do it, like bill and joel, but a lot of people are also trying to survive day-to-day.
The fishing would be insane. "Fishing the waters of Wyoming is like finding paradise on earth. With 4,200 lakes, 27,000 miles of rivers and streams and 14 reservoirs that are home to more than 22 species of fish, the opportunities are endless for casting a line on Wyoming's blue-ribbon waters."
shareAnd why dont they actually farm animals. 2 rabbits become a lot of rabbits very easily.
shareAs Ryan George says, “it’s so the movie can happen”
share