Scientists estimate how fast the zombie epidemic will wipe out mankind
About the hundredth day after the "zombie Apocalypse" and the rapid spread of zombies on the Ground the number of people reduced to a level at which re-colonization of the planet will be almost impossible to say mathematics in an article published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics.
© AP Photo/ Chiang Ying-ying
One of the most popular doomsday scenarios today is the so-called "zombie Apocalypse" – the destruction of humanity as a result of the rapid spread of certain virus or bacteria that turn their victims in extremely violent and stupid creatures, driven only by hunger. When a zombie bites other people, he gives them their infection and thus helps the microbe to spread.
Of course, in the real world this is unlikely to happen, but scientists are still actively studying the "zombie Apocalypse". Why do they do it? The fact is that such scenarios end of the world allow physicians to calculate the consequences of outbreaks is still incurable and deadly diseases such as the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and to find ways of deterrence.
A perfect epidemic
James Moore (James Moore) from the University of Leicester (UK) and his colleagues decided to calculate what time you will need such outbreaks in order to completely destroy humanity or to reduce the human population to a level at which it will die by itself.
The speed of development "zombpocalypse", as noted by a physicist, depends on two main parameters, how likely and how fast is the process of "zombification" after contact with a zombie, and life expectancy is similar to the "undead".
Books and movies describing the process, give a completely different picture in some movies such as "28 days later", infection occurs virtually instantaneously and is guaranteed, but the zombies live in them long enough – a few tens of days. In other films such as "Resident evil", the infection process takes several hours and it can be stopped, but do zombies live for decades, not needing water or food.
Assessing the impact of such "flashes of zombie education", Moore and his team decided not to Express sympathy to one or another film and came up with your own scenario by modeling it on the basis of these two indicators for the worst epidemic in human history – outbreak of plague, "black death" in Medieval Europe in the 14th century of our era.
In their scenario, the infection by the bite of a zombie occurred with a probability of 90%, and the "individuals" lived about 20 days, dying of thirst and hunger. The total number of Lands were taken from real contemporary performance – about 7.5 billion people.
Model the spread of zombies, created by the British physicists to take into account the existence of borders between countries and the fact that people are distributed on Earth is extremely uneven. For example, one of the rules in this model was that the zombies could not cross the border if they have not accumulated at least 10 thousand in the territory of the country where they originally "lived". If the zombies could not reach these populations, they "died out" like a local epidemics.
100 days later
As shown by these calculations, even just one infected person in a fairly densely populated area in principle, enough to cause a large-scale epidemic about the 20th day after infection. After 100 days, according to the calculations of researchers on the Ground will live only 181 people and approximately 190 million zombies.
Even in those cases when people will run away from areas covered by the "zombiepocalypse", the infection will still win people to the same 100 day on Earth will be about 273 people and about a million "living dead."
And in that and in other case, the number of survivors will be almost below the level required to "restart" civilization and re-colonization of the planet. Accordingly, if the "zombie epidemic" will last longer than 100 days, humanity will be doomed to extinction, the authors conclude.
