How to survive a zombie apocalypse, according to science

If you've ever watched an episode of The Walking Dead you'll know that escaping a horde of zombies is not easy.

You'll have to arm yourself to the teeth and find a well-protected building, practically impossible to breach.

Of course, if you are lucky to survive the initial outbreak, finding a facility like that and enough weapons isn't going to be easy.

Picture: Giphy

So, fortunately for us, if the Dawn of the Dead does become a reality overnight scientists have researched the best places for us to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Using the methods used to research the outbreaks of real diseases, experts at Cornell University have found that staying in a big city is a guaranteed way to get eaten by the undead.

According to them, the best way to avoid death would be to head to the hill or the mountains as they aren't highly populated and are mostly hard to reach.

The researchers looked exclusively at the United States and as this is pure fiction they had to predict the ways that zombies could kill someone or other ways people could die in such a scenario.

There's also little way of determining how fast the outbreak would grow, how aggressive and mobile the zombies would be or where the origins of the outbreak would be.

Therefore they had to build a simulation, based on modern epidemiology modelling and apply different methods to the situation.

Eureka Alert quote lead researcher Alexander Alemi as writing in a press release:

At their heart, the simulations are akin to modelling chemical reactions taking place between different elements and, in this case, we have four states a person can be in--human, infected, zombie, or dead zombie--with approximately 300 million people.

However, leaving the cities might only be a temporary measure as after 28 days (hmm...that sounds familiar) it was presumed that the zombies would have eaten most of what they could find and would have moved on to victims elsewhere.

Alemi adds:

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.

I'd love to see a fictional account where most of New York City falls in a day, but upstate New York has a month or so to prepare.

This is all pure fiction and there is no need to start stocking up and supplies and making plans to visit the nearest set of mountains but you never know when this sort of information might come in handy.

The original research was conducted in 2015 as part of the American Physical Society March meeting but they did admit that they would be inclined to do more in-depth research on the subject in the future.

Given the time, we could attempt to add more complicated social dynamics to the simulation, such as allowing people to make a run for it, include plane flights, or have an awareness of the zombie outbreak, etc.

HT IFL Science

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