Bad blood: Polish scientist calculates odds of victory in apocalyptic war between humans and vampires

Just in time for Halloween, a Polish physicist has developed a web-based ‘Vampire Apocalypse Calculator’ to determine just how well we’d fare as a species if we ever found ourselves in a war with bloodsuckers. (Spoiler: Not well).

Dominik Czernia, a physicist at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków, spent a month of his free time developing the macabre calculator using the predator-prey model, based on game theory and using research on instances of vampires in literature and fiction.

“It was quite a time-consuming project. I started by finding an interesting paper regarding vampires, where the authors subtly suggested the existence of vampires based on real-life data,” Czernia told ScienceAlert.

In the calculator, users can select the types of vampires humanity could be up against, and then set parameters such as human population size as well as the number of vampires and how bloodthirsty they are. You can even control the number of vampire hunters on the loose. 

For those wishing to indulge a ghoulish pessimism about the future of humanity, the stats and graphs of the Vampire Apocalypse Calculator show exactly how a potential humans versus vampires war would play out and it does not look good for mankind (well, in most scenarios anyway).

“I had to give meaning to raw numbers to build the atmosphere of a vampire apocalypse,” Czernia adds.

Combining science with fiction, in some sort of… science fiction (though hard sci-fi fans are sure to claim that it’s ‘fantasy’), Czernia references real-world vampiric species such as vampire bats and finches, leeches and, of course, the ever-irritating mosquitoes.  

In addition, he points out that humans can and do practice hematophagy or feeding on blood, though typically in the rather mundane form of blood sausages. No need to sharpen your stakes just yet then.

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