25 October 2016

Atlas Obscura: Here's How Long it Would Take for Vampires to Annihilate Humanity

A surprisingly large number of academic studies—as in, more than one—have applied mathematical modeling to the concept of human-vampire co-existence. Using the depiction of bloodsuckers in various forms of media, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to True Blood, these papers look at whether Earth's vampire population would inevitably annihilate humanity, and, if so, how long it would take.

Mathematically influenced scholarship of vampire-human relations took off in the early '80s courtesy of Richard Hartl and Alexander Mehlmann, Austrian mathematicians with a mutual penchant for the undead. In 1982, their paper, titled "The Transylvanian Problem of Renewable Resources" was published in the operations research journal RAIRO. In it, Hartl and Mehlmann posited "optimal bloodsucking strategies for dynamic continuous vampires." [...]

There was a lull in vampiric math papers during the '90s and early aughts, but in 2007, another article analyzed the plausibility of human-vampire co-existence. In “Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality: Ghosts, Vampires, and Zombies,” published in Skeptical Inquirer, authors Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi presented a pessimistic view of humanity's future in the face of thirsty vampires. "The fact of the matter is," they wrote, "if vampires truly feed with even a tiny fraction of the frequency that they are depicted to in movies and folklore, then the human race would have been wiped out quite quickly after the first vampire appeared." 

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