Looking for the safest place to sit out the end of civilization brought about by a plague of shuffling zombies? Head for the northern Rocky Mountains, researchers at Cornell University say.
The history of a fictitious zombie war as laid out in the book World War Z or the AMC series "Walking Dead," combined with data from actual outbreaks of virus diseases, allowed researchers to model a zombie outbreak and determine a best survival strategy.
That let them test rates of infections and compare them to other models created to study actual disease epidemics, the researchers said as they presented their "statistical mechanics of zombies" study at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Texas.
"Modeling zombies takes you through a lot of the techniques used to model real diseases, albeit in a fun context," says Cornell graduate student Alex Alemi, describing the work as a good introduction to how diseases spread in the real world.
"It's interesting in its own right as a model, as a cousin of traditional SIR [susceptible, infected, and resistant] models --which are used for many diseases -- but with an additional nonlinearity," he said.
The simulations were based on four states any person could be in during an outbreak, Alemi explained; healthy human, infected but still alive human, dead but mobile zombie, or dead-dead zombie.
In books and movies, most zombie outbreaks are depicted as affecting all areas of the country simultaneously, quickly leaving just a few pockets of healthy human survivors.
However, the Cornell simulations suggested it would happen somewhat differently, Alemi said; densely populated areas and cities would collapse quickly, but zombies would penetrate sparsely populated regions more slowly.
The northern reaches of the Mountain Time zone could remain zombie-free for months, he said.
"Given the dynamics of the disease, once the zombies invade more sparsely populated areas, the whole outbreak slows down -- there are fewer humans to bite, so you start creating zombies at a slower rate," he explains.
If you want to survive an admittedly unlikely zombie apocalypse for as long as might be possible, he says, head for the northern Rockies.
The logistics of getting there could be difficult, he admits, but it's "fun to know" how you could survive.
There's considerable benefit to applying hard scientific research techniques to what might be considered just a "fun" topic, Alemi says, particularly if it helps make learning about science enjoyable and entertaining.
"A lot of modern research can be off-putting for people because the techniques are complicated and the systems or models studied lack a strong connection to everyday experiences," Alemi notes. "Not that zombies are an everyday occurrence, but most people can wrap their brains around them."
If you'll pardon the pun.
