MovieChat Forums > The Girl with All the Gifts (2017) Discussion > If the story was real

If the story was real

posted 8 years ago by Tarrott
3 replies | jump to latest

I get the ending, even the epilogue from the book (someone posted it here in the forums)
The kids learn superfast and become the humans 2.0, their children aren't even hungry anymore, so no more going crazy for meat. They become "normal" humans with higher intellect and they require less calories and no sleep thanks to the fungus.

But if the story was real, there would be no more trained adults for a while to keep all the nuclear power plants from melting down, and other things that require maintenance. With all the disasters on top of the fungus outbreaks, its safe to say it would be the end of mankind, the 2.0 humans would have died out from radiation and other *beep* that comes with the apocaliptic events.

[–] joel-e-stephen 8 years ago

That makes sense and would end up that way. Though if it happened slowly then we may still stand a chance. If we follow the movies timeline, but in the real world, then it has to have been 8-10 years since the outbreak began since they got the kids as babies. Also the humans 1.0 built facilities and specialized vehicles which means industry of some kind lasted for a bit. Nuclear plants would fail pretty quickly without human intervention. I'm guessing that for the movies timeline to work in the real world all the nuclear plants would have to have been safely shutdown and scuttled to avoid your scenario as the population dwindled. More realistic then both our scenarios is that a large portion of the planet would be a nuclear/chemical/bio weapon wasteland because they would of done everything they could to stop the infection.

[–] raf-33 8 years ago

I agree with joel - in an overnight catastrophe that annihilated the population, like a nuclear war or a solar flare there would be no one to tend to the nuclear plants and they would melt, but in a zombie apocalypse or other slow-building disaster orders would be given to shut down the reactors and their fuel dropped in to naturally cooled ponds.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. -Isaac Asimov

[–] Nethlem 8 years ago

With all the disasters on top of the fungus outbreaks, its safe to say it would be the end of mankind, the 2.0 humans would have died out from radiation and other *beep* that comes with the apocaliptic events.

Or the exact opposite would happen: The radiation would increase their growth even further because certain type of fungi are known to thrive under gamma radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

The fungi use melanin (skin pigments that give us different skin colors) to do that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677413/
So it stands to reason that "dark skinned fungi people" would be more efficient at converting the gamma radiation into biological growth/adaption, due to higher levels of melanin in their bodies.
This can even serve as an explanation why the dark skinned Melanie (get it?) is so much faster at learning than the other kids.