A team of student from the Lancaster University showed what would happen during a zombie apocalypse.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – If you are a fan of zombie movies or perhaps zombie apocalypse survival video games, perhaps you have sometimes wondered about the outcome of such a cataclysmic event. In that case, you will be delighted to find out that a few students from the Lancaster University (UK) have studied what will happen during a zombie apocalypse and how will we survive.
Although the idea of the living dead coming to eat our brains might seem somewhat implausible, a highly virulent pathogen that can infect every living tissue is a frightening reality. To determine how fast can such as virus spread and the odds of us surviving a new plague, a team of students from the Lancaster University create two doomsday scenarios.
Their zombie apocalypse study had two stages, each of them accounts for different variables. The students aimed to show how such a contagion would spread using the SIR model, a simple epidemiological model, used to describe how a disease can spread.
They’ve started with the assumption that shortly, a viral outbreak will transform people into zombies. Assuming that a zombie can feed only once per day and that it has a 90 percent chance of infecting a living person, a zombie plague can thin out the human population in just one hundred days.
The estimated rate of survival would be in the hundreds, assuming for a moment that a zombie’s lifespan does not exceed 20 days. This was the first stage of their study, in which the students wanted to determine pathogen dispersion rates. However, they did not account for other variables such as birth/death ration and, of course, the survivors killing zombies.
They said that the rate of birth is inconsequential for the first part of the study since the virulent pathogen can wipe out most of the world’s population in 100 days. For the second stage of their zombie apocalypse project, the team took into account the two variables and discovered that humanity’s chances of survival would greatly improve if the survivors decide to thin out the brain-eating beasts.
However, there are other variables which they did not account for such as a cure for the zombie plague, or more radical measure like nuking contaminated area. In the end, the study proved that although all life on Earth can disappear in approximately four months, we will be able to even the odds by fighting back.
Image source: Pixabay
Melissa Gansler
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