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Physics students have worked out how quickly a zombie apocalypse would wipe out the human race

Physics students have worked out how quickly a zombie apocalypse would wipe out the human race
Physics students have worked out how quickly a zombie apocalypse would wipe out the human race Physics students have worked out how quickly a zombie apocalypse would wipe out the human race

In the event of a zombie apocalypse the human race would be almost completely wiped out in just 100 days, a group of students has calculated.

Students from the University of Leicester worked out that in 100 days, fewer than 300 people would remain, and would be outnumbered by zombies a million to one.

Without the ability to fight back, the human race would die out completely within a year, their calculations suggested.

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To work this out, they assumed that each zombie would find one person a day, and had a 90% chance of turning their victims into zombies.

Although only semi-serious, the students used a modelling method used by doctors to predict the spread of real diseases like Ebola and even the flu.

In a follow-up study, they looked at how people would get better at avoiding zombie infection as time went on. In this second scenario, the human population seemed likely to survive.

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A Freedom of Information request in 2012 revealed the government’s plans in the case of a zombie apocalypse.

According to The Telegraph, the MoD said: “In the event of an apocalyptic incident (eg zombies), any plans to rebuild and return England to its pre-attack glory would be led by the Cabinet Office, and thus any pre-planning activity would also taken place there.”

The research was published in an internal journal run by the university’s physics department.