Bram Stoker. Friedrich Murnau. Stephen King. Anne Rice. Just a handful of the many writers (and directors) who have played with and adapted the night's most famous monsters. Over the decades, the vampire gained and lost abilities, expanded its philosophical view of un-life, and even went to extremes like hunting its own kind. Yet the possibility of a vampire apocalypse never completely disappeared. An online calculator developed by Dominik Czernia from the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków lets us apply different models to determine how close we are to absolute bloodsucking conquest.
One of the most striking things about vampires is the traditional profile of their vulnerabilities: They need to drink blood. The Sun turns them to ashes. A stake through the heart kills them. Of course, some modern writers have decided to modify and/or ignore several of these (not to go too far, Stephenie Meyer's vampires "sparkle" during the day), but beyond the exceptions, there is a background truth that doesn't change: Despite their immortality, they are not indestructible.
Now... mathematics suggests another path for vampires. One of total conquest, extermination of the human species, and inevitable disappearance of vampires due to lack of food. In 2006, physics professor Costas Efthimiou from the University of Central Florida gave the example of a "first vampire" born at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Even if the vampire decided to limit its feeding and transformation of victims to one per month, the human population of the time would disappear in two and a half years.
Calculating the Vampire Apocalypse
Would you like to calculate this with other variables? Thanks to the work of Dominik Czernia from the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków, we have at our fingertips an online calculator focused on the apocalyptic potential of vampires. The calculator lets us adjust parameters such as initial human population, percentage of transformations, its growth, original number of vampires and hunters, and how frequent attacks are, among other things. For example, the "Stoker-King" model of vampire evolution is decisive: humanity disappears in less than 31 months, and without a viable alternative food source, vampires won't take long to disappear.
The same happens in the "Rice model", with the difference that those 31 months turn into 35 years. In the case of "Harris-Meyer-Kostova", the apocalypse never comes due to a cyclical balance between hunters, vampires, and population. The last model, "Dusk of Humanity", seems taken from a role-playing game. 500 vampires against 101 hunters in a city of almost 800,000 people. The final victory belongs to humans... after fighting for more than 66 years. Think you can do better? Change some values, and calculate!
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