Don't let a so-so season of The Walking Dead fool you. People are still really into pondering zombie-centric doomsday scenarios, particularly in light of literally every single thing that happened last year. In that spirit, exactly how long would dumbass humans last when confronted with a zombie takeover?
Per the Huffington Post, research recently published in the University of Leicester's peer-reviewed Journal of Physics Special Topics concluded that a zombie outbreak would knock Earth's population down to "100 to 200 survivors" in just 100 days. The number of theoretical zombies in that worst-case scenario? 190 million.
Researchers used a mathematical model that predicts the spread of the hypothetical disease, with the zombies representing just how quickly the planet could be eradicated by something as seemingly simple as a virus. Zombies, for the purposes of the initial study, were assumed to boast an estimated life span of 20 days and a 90 percent success rate of infecting at least one person each day.
Though recent events have taught us to never underestimate the unfortunate power of sheer stupidity, the worst-case assumptions of this study—humans continuing to be easily found, for example—would seem to be easily overcome. In fact, a less depressing scenario in the study boosted the zombie’s life expectancy to a year while simultaneously taking into consideration cool shit like sexual reproduction and an estimated 10 percent chance that humans would each off one zombie a day. In that scenario, the total number of humans still plummeted to just a few hundred. Recovery, however, was able to take root in just 27 years.
