If It Comes to Zombies, We're Screwed

At least according to science...

'The Walking Dead': Why Humans Will Never Defeat Zombies

One educator is using the premise of AMC's "The Walking Dead," where zombie hordes stalk the landscape of a postapocalyptic United States, to teach an online course on disease-spread dynamics.

Though the show's landscape is futuristic, the spread of zombies works just as it does with any other communicable disease, said Sarah Eichhorn, the course instructor and a mathematician at the University of California, Irvine.

A lot like rabies, in fact, where a bite is the main means of transmission, the time between transmission and onset of the diseas can be long and variable, and the disease itself causes behavior that encourages transmission.

As part of the course — which will be taught through Instructure, an education technology company — students will model how zombie hordes grow and see how such factors as vaccines, zombie kill rates and population alter the threat. The goal is to use the undead to teach students about real-life diseases. [Zombie Facts: Real and Imagined (Infographic)]

Of course, there are a few differences between zombies and the measles.

"In normal diseases, we don't try to kill the people who are sick," Eichhorn told LiveScience.

 Not yet.  But Obamacare is coming.

Becoming a zombie is harder than catching the flu, because healthy people must be within biting distance of a zombie to become infected, whereas healthy people can catch a bug like the flu from particles transmitted through the air

But the only way to stop the undead is to kill them, which usually requires getting up close to the creatures.

Unlike humans, zombies don't seem to die of natural causes, at least on "The Walking Dead."

I've often wondered what the imaginary scientific basis for their apparent resistance to lethal damage.  How do their bodies work?  Clearly, they don't need much circulatory function, to move oxygen around to tissues, since they can loose all their blood and continue to function.  Does the tissue cannibalize itself in the absence of food?   If so, the problem should be self limiting.  Unless they learn to catch and eat squirrels, they're due to waste away.

That slightly changes the picture, because how the disease spreads varies with both the number of sick people and the number of healthy people who can kill the zombies, Eichhorn said.

The bad news is that the humans on "The Walking Dead" are probably doomed.

The math of zombie infection suggests the undead win most of the time, according to recent research by Robert J. Smith?, a mathematics professor at the University of Ottawa (who writes his name with a question mark at the end), and his students.

Clearly, however, they must have some rudimentary brain activity, which typically dies after a short time with no oxygen.  Do they eat brains to renew their neural tissue?

Based on the scenes in the show depicting huge zombie hordes, complete doom is even more likely, Eichhorn said.

Yet the humans aren't out of options. Humans could still survive by creating a vaccine, though the show makes such a zombie immunization seem like a long shot.

"The world is kind of wiped out on the show, and they don't have a lot of scientists who are studying the disease," Eichhorn said.

Coming up with a cure could also give humans a way to prevail.

And speaking of zombie food, why don't zombies eat other zombies?  Are they lacking in some important micronutrient that real people produce but zombies can't manufacture upon resurrection?  How do they know zombies from normal people; most people behave like zombies.

The other way out involves sex: If humans can somehow outbreed the zombies, then humanity could gain the upper hand. That requires an "insanely high birth rate," Eichhorn said. In her models, she found that women would have to deliver triplets with each birth in order to outcompete the zombies. And who has time for making babies when you're busy killing zombies?

Sounds good to me.  Although, there's not a lot of difference between a room full of toddlers and a zombie horde.

Perhaps the impact would be localized, as the show centers on a small region of Georgia. Other parts of the world might be affected less, in which case the zombies could still be beaten.

Even if the numbers are not in humans' favor, the creators of the show have liberties that real pandemic workers don't: They can simply manufacture a happy ending.

"In the movie 'World War Z,' they show hordes and hordes and hordes of zombies, but it still ends well for people," Eichhorn said.

 If they want to succeed, the zombies better get Brad Pitt right off.

 Wombat-Socho has the great compendium of Rule 5 posts up at The Other McCain "Rule 5 Sunday: Birthday Week."