Statistical Mechanics Finds Best Places To Hide During Zombie Apocalypse

HughPickens.com writes Eric Mack reports at Cnet that a team of researchers at Cornell University, inspired by the book "World War Z" by Max Brooks, have used statistical-mechanics to model how an actual zombie outbreak might unfold and determined the best long-term strategy for surviving the walking dead: Head for the hills. Specifically, you should probably get familiar now with the general location of Glacier National Park so that when it all goes down, you can start heading in that direction. The project started with differential equations to model a fully connected population, then moved on to lattice-based models, and ended with a full US-scale simulation of an outbreak across the continental US. "At their heart, the simulations are akin to modeling chemical reactions taking place between different elements and, in this case, we have four states a person can be in--human," says Alex Alemi, "infected, zombie, or dead zombie--with approximately 300 million people."

Alemi believes cities would succumb to the zombie scourge quickly, but the infection rate would slow down significantly in more sparsely populated areas and could take months to reach places like the Northern Rockies and Glacier National Park. "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," Alemi says. Once you hit Montana and Idaho, you might as well keep heading farther north into the Canadian Rockies and all the way up to Alaska where data analysis shows you're most likely to survive the zombie apocalypse. The state with the lowest survival rate? — New Jersey. Unfortunately a full scale simulation of an outbreak in the United States shows that for `realistic' parameters, we are largely doomed.

Comments

Re:Of Course

[jandrese]

It's probably using some existing outbreak model and imputing parameters for a particular kind of "zombie". Most of these "scientific zombie studies" are thinly veiled pandemic modeling scenarios.

Best idea is not to hide.

[gurps_npc]

The key thing about zombie attacks is:

1) Zombies are stupid

2) Humans rule the world because we are smart, not because we are strong, not because we are hard to kill, nor because we are numerous. One smart human with 30 minutes to prepare makes a spear and scares off a lion, wolf, or even a bear. Why? Because we are some sneaky, devious, son's of bitches that outwit enemies.

3) Everyone always says your average human can defeat one zombie in pretty much every single movie or book. the zombies only are scary in large numbers.

4) So please tell me how in the real world a single zombie can infect all the rest of us?

It simply can NOT happen. The zombies will have surprise on their side for maybe 10 hours - and that's assuming it turns zombie close to nightfall. But even then, the surprise won't last long.

Come the day after the zombie outbreak ends, they will all be dead. They will NEVER take an entire city. At best they might take over a small town/rural community before word gets out, and humans arm ourselves with spears, axes, shotguns, torches, etc. Yeah, a few new zombies would be created after the surprise wore off, but if 1 human kills on average 3 zombies before they themselves become a zombie, then the number of zombies would drop like a bar of lead dropped out of an airplane.

Zombies are the stuff of nightmare only for children and sick people. To a human in the prime of his life they are an excuse to have some violent fun.

Zombie apocalypse universe rules

[swb]

While I enjoy the genre, I find that the "rules" of zombie apocalypse seem designed to limit the ability to humans to fight back by imposing arbitrary limits on the effectiveness of weapons.

Brooks quickly discounts the effectiveness of military weapons like cluster munitions, Gatling guns and other kinds of weapons designed to put a large amount of shrapnel or projectiles into an area quickly. Even if it didn't result in killing of an entire horde, I would expect it to kill a large number and greatly reduce the threat of most of them by seriously degrading their mobility through damage to their ability to walk or move.

I'd like to see a Mythbusters episode where they take a 7.62mm Gatling gun and fire it into a simulated zombie horde at average head height to see what kind of damage it would do. It's probably beyond practicality to setup that many targets, but it would be an interesting simulation nonetheless.

I think the simplest way to deal with a horde would be a minor adaption of a machine designed to clear minefields -- the demining flail. These slightly resemble a combine bolted onto the front of a tank, with the "combine" being basically a bunch of steel weights on the ends of chains designed to beat on the ground to set off mines.

It's not hard to imagine a much lighter weight device (since zombies don't explode) spinning 5 pound weights in the air. It would completely pulverize zombies and turn clearing zombie hordes into something akin to mowing the grass.

I may regret sharing this....

[argStyopa]

...but my refuge for the zombie apocalypse?
The town water tower. Specifically, INSIDE/atop.

First benefit is that (until now) nobody else would be going there, and you avoid the panic-rush when everyone gets stuck on the freeways.
Many/most(?) stations have emergency generators already built in and by law well-equipped for sustained operation.
Ample fresh water, obviously, and a great situation for catching clean rainfall.

Most of our local towers are largely flat, and basically immune to severe weather and heavily insulated, meaning you'd have a secure, highly defensible place with great sightlines (to signal/communicate other survivors, if that's something you want to do), so high that even if they were attracted to your location, they'd have to pile up so high they'd pretty much liquefy at the bottom before getting to you.

Bring your acetylene kit as you evacuate*, and you could really build a nice home in there, including ziplines to nearby roofs/buildings for foraging (granted, getting back up there if there were zombies around your entry might stink).
*lots of small communities actually have a fair amount of tools stored right inside in the base for maintenance, saving you a lot of work.

It's cold up there

[duckintheface]

There is a reason that Glacier National Park has fewer zombies. It has fewer people to start with so there would be less "feed stock" to make zombies. But there is a reason there are so few people in the area. It's very cold and hard to survive there. So maybe Key West would be a better alternative. And of course, if everyone tries to get to GNP, it will be very crowded with people... and zombies.

Re:seriously

[Bacon Bits]

Yes, traditional zombie-ism is modeled like a disease that is highly contagious, highly virulent, and requires direct contact to transmit. Truthfully, the prominent characteristic of zombie-ism is that the infected are easily distinguishable.

Imagine a highly contagious disease which was transmitted by physical contact with two symptoms: it drastically increases the infected subject's sex drive, and it reduces social inhibitions. It also has exactly one prognosis: It renders 100% the infected subjects totally and incurably sterile.

How fast do you think that would burn through the population? What steps do you think the uninfected would take?