WASHINGTON 鈥斅燱here is the best place to be in the event of a zombie apocalypse? It鈥檚 a question many have pondered, but now scientists have the answer 鈥� and D.C.鈥檚 brains don鈥檛 fare well when it comes to encroaching flesh-eating undead.
to determine what a zombie outbreak would look like and how it would spread through the United States.
The model confirmed what many in the nation鈥檚 densely populated regions fear: The key to surviving the zombie apocalypse is to live as far away from a city as possible, reports .
The the researchers developed shows the D.C. area getting swallowed by zombies within the first 48 hours.
Other, more remote, areas could be spared for days, weeks, months or even years, researchers found.
鈥淚t鈥檚 bad to be near any big city,鈥� Alex Alemi, a researcher with the project, said to The Washington Post.
He says聽in a far-removed city,聽鈥渋t would be a situation where you鈥檙e watching chaos on television, but where you are everything would remain unchanged.鈥�
The researchers’ model is built on some fundamentals. One is the聽鈥渂ite-to-kill鈥� ratio, which measures how often a person would kill a zombie versus how often a聽zombie would infect聽a human. Also, the model assumes that zombies can only travel by foot.
Additionally, the model says transportation breaks down during a zombie event, meaning聽if you live in D.C.聽when the outbreak occurs, you can’t get in or out.
鈥淭ransportation would likely break down in an outbreak,鈥� Alemi said to The Post.
Alemi contends that there is really no hope in a zombie apocalypse situation and that eventually it would kill us all.
鈥淶ombies are unique and very different than other diseases in that victims of other diseases either get better or succumb to the disease,鈥� Alemi told The Post.
鈥淏ut zombies are the undead. They don鈥檛 get better. And the only way to stop them is for a human to kill the zombie. With other diseases, no matter how many infections you model, the disease is not going to infect every single person. But in the zombie model, you really can turn every single person into a zombie.鈥�
Don鈥檛 go packing up to head to a remote area just yet, Alemi says. A rush to underpopulated regions would only make them vulnerable.
Also, he reminds people聽to not get too carried away with the possibilities of an attack from bloodthirsty undead. The research is a way to apply hard science to a popular, fun topic.
The Cornell researchers will present their findings at the 2015 American Physical Society March Meeting, on Thursday, March 5, in San Antonio, Texas.
