By Michael Banks in San Antonio, Texas
If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of trying to survive a zombie apocalypse in the US, what should you do?
Well, according to Alex Alemi of Cornell University and colleagues, you should head to the Rocky Mountains or the Nevada desert.
Using 2010 US census data for population levels around the country, Alemi and colleagues used statistical mechanics to model how a zombie outbreak would spread.
The researchers assume that each person can be in one of four “states”: human, infected, zombie or dead. They start the model with one in every million people being infected and assume that the zombies then randomly walk around, travelling at about 20 cm each second. When a zombie comes into contact with a person, the researchers also take into account that a human could kill the zombie rather than just succumbing to a nibble on the neck (or worse!).
While most movies assume that after a zombie outbreak cities would be left with pockets of human survivors, the researchers find instead that towns would quickly fall but it would take months for the zombies to break into less densely populated areas.
“Things would get bad really quickly,” says Alemi. “Zombies are pretty terrible.” Indeed, after just one day, 10 million people would be infected, with half the US population gone in just a week. But it would take more then five months until almost everyone is part of the walking dead. Yet even then there would still be a few zombie-free locations in places like the Nevada desert.
Alemi and colleagues are now looking to improve their model to take into account that, with time, humans would get better at seeing off zombies, allowing for a greater chance of survival.
Yet there is a serious side to the research, as it could be used to model the outbreak of infectious diseases. But as Alemi makes clear, there are no actual real-life systems that follow actual zombie behaviour.
