In case you haven’t heard - Canadian and Australian mathematicians from the The Department of Mathematics at the The University of Ottawa have decided to take the mystery out of the survival promises of the human race when the dead finally have enough and decides to kill us all.

The basis of the paper is this, by creating a mathematical model of the infection rate of the classical pop-culture zombie: slow moving, cannibalistic and undead -we can project our survival rate.

We don’t do so well.

Their paper is one of several (but the only zombie related one) to be included in the 2009 Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress book, which (according to Amazon.com), has not been released yet - but if you want to pre order a copy you can do so here.

I imagine the authors wrote this paper because they were sick and tired of the mistaken hope that people have that they can survive a zombie invasion. So when the dead actually start walking, and everyone is telling you to run - or pulling out their copies of The Zombie Survival Guide you can point to this paper and say:

“No, no, we are fucked - it’s been statistically proven. We might as well just wait here to die.”

But just how fucked are we?

The zombification model created and used is based on the SIR models for infectious diseases, with some modifications - because, unlike the measles, when you encounter a zombie you have an opportunity to cave their head in instead of becoming a zombie, reducing the effective infection rate of the infected population (ie: stop the zombies by shooting them in the head, they can’t eat you if you made them dead.)

From this infection projection model it is revealed that over a short timescale a zombie infection will result in the eradication of the human civilisation, unless dealt with quickly and severely. As the timescale increases our eventual extinction becomes more and more certain.

“In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly.”

I’m pleased that they used the classical pop-culture zombie for their modeling, it really enforces that Hollywood’s trend of making zombies more dangerous (ie: making them faster, smarter, stronger) is really unnecessary. Everyone is still going to die anyway - whats the rush?

To read this great paper, click here.