They’re everywhere, zombies. They’re rising up all around us. We have movies (Zombieland, Dead Snow), video games (Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead), board games, and books (World War Z, Zombie Survival Guide, Breathers). This Fall, they’ll shuffle and chew their way into the Star Wars universe (Death Troopers). Increasingly large groups of still-living people go on Zombie Walks. There are even serious scholarly works on zombie infection rates. Oh, you read that last one correctly, scholarly papers on zombie infection rates. But we’ll come back to that shortly.
Zombies and Me (and you)
I’ve been pretty open about my odd relationship with the undead. They freak me out; I mean, the really freak me out and in ways that other “undead” monsters don’t, like vampires. It’s easy to understand why, vampires retain their outward human appearance to a greater degree than the rotting undead (of course, the fact that vampires have been so successfully de-fanged as monsters and turned to more of an altered-state human certainly removes the fright factor). But it’s more the thought of an unthinking, rotting, should-clearly-not-be-trying-to-eat-me creature is up and lurking around, unstoppable unless you take out its head, really, for lack of a better term, gets under my skin.
More troubling is that zombies quickly give birth to more zombies. If you “survive” a zombie attack, it’s only a temporary reprieve as bites and scratches will have you jonesing for brains in short order. And here we return to that scholarly paper. You don’t have to take my word for it, a group of concerned students at the University of Ottawa created a mathematical model of zombie infection rates and the effects of a zombie outbreak.
No kidding. If you want to check it out, you can do so here: When Zombies Attack: Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection [PDF | University of Ottawa]. Its formulas and mathematical proofs are only ever so slightly out of my grasp, but I get the gist: Zombie outbreak = doom. Below is a story from NPR, in which professor Robert Smith? (and yeah, his name is spelled with a question mark) talks about the paper.
And yet, I can’t help but feel that there are problems with this mathematical model. It has nothing to do with professor Smith? research or math skills, those are above the bar; the problem is with zombies themselves.
The Problems with Zombies
Are they really the destructive, unconquerable monsters we think they are? Well, that question isn’t quite right, you can create advantageous situations where zombies, at least in one-on-one showdowns can be pretty conquerable. No, the question is, could they really swamp an entire population?
I’m not convinced that they could. Zombies have a few knocks against them that would go a long way towards hampering their ability overtake whole civilizations. Here’s a few of the trouble points:
