You know you're forgetting something, right?
Give up?
It's your zombie attack survival plan!
And this one is backed by science. Graduate students from Cornell University plan to present their findings to The American Physical Society on March 5 in San Antonio, Tx.
"We build up to a full scale simulation of an outbreak in the United States, and discover that for 'realistic' parameters, we are largely doomed," the study authors wrote in November 2014.
Oh, yeah... about that... yes, yes, they did say we're doomed, but there is hope if a swelling of brain-eating-dust-bags takes over your town - Alexander A. Alemi, Matthew Bierbaum, Christopher R. Myers and James P. Sethna think they might have it all figured out.
Inspired by the book "World War Z" and a graduate statistical mechanics class, the four students decided to explore how an outbreak of the undead would spread in the United States. "Modeling zombies takes you through a lot of the techniques used to model real diseases, albeit in a fun context," Alemi told Science X Network. "It's interesting in its own right as a model, as a cousin of traditional SIR [susceptible, infected, and resistant] models - which are used for many diseases - but with an additional nonlinearity."
The project entailed an overview of modern epidemiology modeling, differential equations to represent a connected population, lattice-based models and a to-scale simulation of an outbreak across the continental United States. "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, infected, zombie, or dead zombie - with approximately 300 million people," Alemi told Science X.
The project also had to factor in randomness of attacks. "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," Alemi told Science X.
In your typical zombie flick, "if there is a zombie outbreak, it is usually assumed to affect all areas at the same time, and some months after the outbreak you're left with small pockets of survivors," Alemi told Science X. "But in our attempt to model zombies somewhat realistically, it doesn't seem like this is how it would actually go down."
Densely populated cities would be affected first, but less populated areas would have time to prepare. If an outbreak started on the east coast, it could take months for zombies to reach Idaho. "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 told Science X. "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."
So, where do we go when our brains are on someone's (or something's) dinner menu? Head for the hills! Alemi recommends the northern Rockies.
OK, so could this zomb-pocalypse really happen? Maybe not, but Alemi said it is "fun to know," adding that applying hard science to whimsical topics makes learning a lot more fun.
"A lot of modern research can be off-putting for people because the techniques are complicated and the systems or models studied lack a strong connection to everyday experiences," Alemi told Science X. "Not that zombies are an everyday occurrence, but most people can wrap their braains around them."
