061 SMITH JOURNALPATIENT ZERO WAS TWO DAYS AGO,
AND THE INFECTION IS SPREADING.
..........................................
The news doesn’t know what’s going on.
People are raiding supermarkets, grabbing
tinned soup, crossbows, paracetamol and
whatever you’re meant to stockpile in these
situations. There’s traffic clogging the freeways.
And all you can think is, “Oh, god... Zombies
are coming. What the hell should I do?”
It sounds like a scenario designed to entertain
overenthusiastic horror fans. But it turns out
some well-credentialled scientists have also
been wondering how humanity might react
to a shambling, implacable, brain-eating
zombie horde. Can science devise an optimal
Zombie Survival Plan? Or should we all just
go to the Winchester, have a cold pint, and
wait for all this to blow over?
“It’s an interesting challenge, isn’t it?” asks
Professor Greg Foliente, manager of the
University of Melbourne’s Centre for Disaster
Management and Public Safety (CDMPS).
He pauses to readjust his frameless glasses
before cutting to the chase. “From what we
can see, there are really two options: run
away and isolate the zombies, or put a
ring around the infected area.”
You might have guessed, but modelling
undead plagues is not the professor’s day
job. The centre Foliente manages typically
uses spatial simulations to analyse bushfires,
disease outbreaks, hurricanes and other
non-supernatural disasters. But earlier this
year, when a software developer wanted to
promote the Australian release of its latest
zombie video game, State Of Decay 2, they
gave the Melbourne academic a call. “They
said, ‘Can you do some modelling of potential
zombie infection rates in Australia and
New Zealand?’” Foliente wasn’t sure: fiction
enquiries were usually handled by the Arts
Faculty a few buildings over. “But the CDMPS
is interested in the potential outbreak and
spread of epidemics,” he reasoned. And what
is a zombie apocalypse if not an epidemic?Foliente agreed to help, and assigned staff
to plot out how an outbreak might go down.
Surprisingly, they didn’t have to start from
scratch. After a little digging, the team turned
up a 2014 Cornell study titled Perturbations
in Epidemiological Models: When Zombies
Attack, We Can Survive! It proved a useful
starting point, and led them to the field’s
most inf luential work: When Zombies Attack!:
Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak
of Zombie Infection, written by a Canadian
professor named Phillip Muntz in 2008.
Based on this research, the outlook seemed
bleak. “An outbreak of zombies infecting
humans is likely to be disastrous unless
extremely aggressive tactics are employed,”
Muntz wrote. “The most effective way
to contain the rise of the undead is
to hit hard and hit often.”Stuffy academics were one thing. But
Foliente’s team even managed to findsome military scholarship on the subject. It
turns out the Pentagon has an official plan for
combating zombie apocalypses: CONPLAN
8888, which rates the threats of everything
from “pathogenic” (virus-like) zombies to
“vegetarian” ghouls that only consume plants.
(The latter were, unsurprisingly, placed pretty
low down on the Pentagon’s hierarchy of
threats.) CONPLAN 8888 also outlines a
contingency plan for dealing with zombie
chickens – the only known zombies to actually
exist in real life. (So-called ‘CZs’ occur when
old hens that can no longer lay eggs are
euthanised, buried, then claw their way back
to the surface. The paper notes, perhaps
unnecessarily, that “CZs are simply
terrifying to behold.”)Foliente’s next task was to take this existing
research (minus the chicken stuff) and
devise a specific mathematical model for
an Australian and New Zealand outbreak,
detailing how fast a plague might spread
and which cities would be most at risk.“Our model is based on what’s known as
a stochastic process,” Foliente explains.
“Which means there’s an element of
randomness. When there’s an interaction
between a zombie and a human, if the
human kills the zombie, the zombie is
taken out of the zombie population.
But if the zombie wins, the human
obviously becomes a zombie.”>>how to survive
a zombie attack
WHEN THE UNDEAD START WALKING THE EARTH,
MELBOURNE SCIENTIST (AND INADVERTENT ZOMBIE
EXPERT) GREG FOLIENTE WILL KNOW WHAT TO DO.Writer James Shackell Illustrator Valentin Tkach