One of the most popular end-of-the-world scenarios today is the so-called "zombie apocalypse" - the destruction of humanity as a result of the rapid spread of a certain virus or bacteria that turns its victims into extremely aggressive and irrational creatures, driven only by hunger. When such a zombie bites other people, it transmits its infection to them and thereby helps the microbe to spread.
Of course, this is unlikely to happen in the real world, but scientists are still actively studying "zombie apocalypses." Why are they doing this? The point is that such "end of the world" scenarios allow doctors to calculate the consequences of outbreaks of yet incurable and deadly diseases, such as Ebola in West Africa, and to find ways to contain them.The speed of the "zombopocalypse", as the physicist notes, depends on two main parameters - how likely and how quickly the process of "zombification" occurs after contact with zombies, and the length of life of such "undead".
Books and movies describing this process give a completely different picture - in some movies, such as "28 Days Later", the infection is virtually instant and guaranteed, but zombies live in them quite briefly - a few dozen days. In other movies, such as Resident Evil, the infection process lasts several hours and can be stopped, but the zombies themselves live for decades without needing water or food.
After calculating the consequences of such "zombie outbreaks," Moore and his team decided not to express sympathy for one film or another and came up with their own scenario, modeling it on these two figures for the worst epidemic in human history: the outbreak of the plague, the "Black Death" in medieval Europe in the 14th century AD.
100 days later. As these calculations show, even just one infected person in a fairly densely populated area is in principle enough to cause a large-scale epidemic by about 20 days after infection. In 100 days, the researchers' calculations show, there will be only 181 people and about 190 million zombies living on Earth.
Even in cases where people will flee from areas covered by the "zombipocalypse," the infection will still defeat people - by the same 100 days, about 273 people and about a million "living dead" will be left on Earth.
In either case, the number of survivors will be almost below the level needed to "restart" civilization and re-colonize the planet. Accordingly, if the "zombie epidemic" lasts longer than 100 days, humanity will be doomed to extinction, conclude the authors of the study.
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