In a world of bath salts, alarming Hawaii text alerts, and Tide Pod challenges, it seems like a zombie apocalypse could occur at any moment. Thankfully, real-life researchers have done the heavy lifting and prepared us for such an event. Scientists at Cornell University released a press release detailing how to properly outlive a zombie outbreak in the real world.
According to the report, one of the main keys to survival is holing up in a less-populated hilly area, specifically the northern Rockies. “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,” Cornell graduate student Alex Alemi said. “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.”
One of the more compelling ways they measured the outbreak was with this simulation map of the United States. Alemi, who created these models to help study a real-world disease outbreak, broke down his zombie predictions. “Each possible interaction – zombie bites human, human kills zombie, zombie moves, etc. is treated like a radioactive decay, with a half-life that depends on some parameters, and we tried to simulate the times it would take for all of these different interactions to fire, where complications arise because when one thing happens it can affect the rates at which all of the other things happen,” he said.
See the rest of Alemi and his team’s report here – then let us know in the comments where YOU would go in the case of a real zombie apocalypse.
Russia.