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Eric Mack reports at Cnet that a team of researchers at Cornell University, inspired by the book "World War Z" by Max Brooks, have used statistical-mechanics to model how an actual zombie outbreak might unfold and determined the best long-term strategy for surviving the walking dead: Head for the hills. Specifically, you should probably get familiar now with the general location of Glacier National Park so that when it all goes down, you can start heading in that direction. The project started with differential equations to model a fully connected population, then moved on to lattice-based models, and ended with a full US-scale simulation of an outbreak across the continental US. "At their heart, the simulations are akin to modelling chemical reactions taking place between different elements and, in this case, we have four states a person can be in--human," says Alex Alemi, "infected, zombie, or dead zombie--with approximately 300 million people."
Alemi believes cities would succumb to the zombie scourge quickly, but the infection rate would slow down significantly in more sparsely populated areas and could take months to reach places like the Northern Rockies and Glacier National Park. "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 says. Once you hit Montana and Idaho, you might as well keep heading farther north into the Canadian Rockies and all the way up to Alaska where data analysis shows you're most likely to survive the zombie apocalypse. The state with the lowest survival rate? - New Jersey. Unfortunately a full scale simulation of an outbreak in the United States shows that for `realistic' parameters, we are largely doomed.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 03 2015, @05:35AM
Glacier National Park is quite defensible, but you would have a damn hard time salting away enough food to last you through the long winter if you miss the salmon run in the autumn. It is an alpine environment, and you'll be competing with bears for the berries and other forage or breaking your teeth on the tough meet of the mountain goats, bighorn sheep, or aforementioned bears. East of the divide in the high country around Browning you'd have better luck with game with the deer and antelope. But that's Blackfoot territory and they would probably not be so keen on outsiders poaching their game in a zombie apocalypse.
So I would say the Flathead Valley is a better bet. It's a very long way from there to any sizeable town or city and it has robust agriculture as well as access to the same salmon that spawn in Glacier. The growing season is not long but it's enough--my grandparents had a large garden and through canning socked away enough veg in the fall to last them through to the spring. Most zombies coming from the outside would wander off and get lost long, long before they got to Bigfork, Somers, Whitefish, or Columbia Falls. And even if not, all you have to do is park a score guys at each of those entrances and you're golden.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday March 03 2015, @09:20AM
But Bigfork has always been populated by zombies. They are just not actively infectious. The giveaway is the Summer Theatre program.