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Anyone who has watched Buffy, Interview With a Vampire or (oh god) Twilight has probably wondered at some point: If vampires were real, would humanity stand a chance?
Well, wonder no more because math has the answer. Dominik Czernia, a physics PhD student at the Institute of Nuclear Physics PAN in Krakow, has created an online tool so you can see for yourself how humanity would fare, and it's based on real math. Not vampire math, but math math.
A while back, a team of researchers in Europe created a mathematical model of interactions between humans and vampires, as depicted in various literature and on film. The mathematicians created a mathematical model of the predator-prey relationship, based on the Lotka-Volterra equations, but adding in humans and vampires as depicted in classic vampire tales (Stoker and King), more recent ones (by Anne Rice), and the twinkling vampires depicted in Twilight. The model then predicts population levels of humans and vampires over time.
The model changes depending on the behavior of the vampires in these different lores. For instance, in the Anne Rice version of vampires, humans become extremely dead (that's "dead dead" not "undead dead") incredibly quickly. Within 49 years, humanity is basically wiped out.
The only scenario where vampires and humans can (somewhat) peacefully co-exist by their reasoning is (sigh) the Twilight version, or as depicted in True Blood, due to the ability of vampires to survive on animal or synthetic blood, leading to sustainable levels of human deaths.
Meanwhile, in the Stoker-King model, "the “explosive” rate of growth in vampire population would lead to the extermination of 80 percent of the human population on the 165th day after the first vampire’s arrival. On the bright side, we take them out with us.
"The scenario is similar to severe epidemic outbreaks and would lead first to the complete extinction of humans and then to the death of all vampires."
The new online calculator allows you to play around with parameters to tailor it to your specific vampire lore tastes. Not a fan of Twilight? No worries, you can choose from five other scenarios or create your own.
Check it out below, or head to the Vampire Apocalypse Calculator.
