Spoiler: the Math Does Not Work.
Nov. 7th, 2019 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madbakerWe're finishing up iZombie this week. It's been fun overall. However, the last few seasons have failed to acknowledge basic math problems with a zombie horde. Namely, that (as often with vampires) you can't make the numbers work to keep both a growing predatory monster population and a normal human population viable.
By the end of the third season, there are ~15,000 zombies in Seattle and they want to create far more across the US so that they can take over from humans. It's canon that each zombie requires one (presumably mature full-size) brain per week to survive. For one zombie, that's 52 brains per year and 936 over the course of 18 years (to replenish the supply). Let's make the numbers even for ease of calculation and call it 1000, since some brains will be unusable - whether by death trauma or problems that would affect the zombie eating the brain, like Alzheimer's. (That also excludes the many additional brains needed if the zombie has to heal.)
For 15k zombies, that's 15 million brains required over 18 years. But zombies are incredibly fecund: one scratch is all it takes to turn a normal human. Sex also transmits, even with prophylactics. So you can't realistically keep the zombie numbers down.
The 2019 US population is estimated at 329 million. You could support maybe 329k zombies - but only if you control the zombie population strictly; every normal brain is harvested every year; and adults are culled early enough on while still reproducing. And none of that wouldn ever happen. And yet no one on the show ever thinks about the math. Because the writers don't have a good answer for that. If I were a character in the show, I'd be loudly talking about this all the time.
This is what being an active math major is like, apparently.
By the end of the third season, there are ~15,000 zombies in Seattle and they want to create far more across the US so that they can take over from humans. It's canon that each zombie requires one (presumably mature full-size) brain per week to survive. For one zombie, that's 52 brains per year and 936 over the course of 18 years (to replenish the supply). Let's make the numbers even for ease of calculation and call it 1000, since some brains will be unusable - whether by death trauma or problems that would affect the zombie eating the brain, like Alzheimer's. (That also excludes the many additional brains needed if the zombie has to heal.)
For 15k zombies, that's 15 million brains required over 18 years. But zombies are incredibly fecund: one scratch is all it takes to turn a normal human. Sex also transmits, even with prophylactics. So you can't realistically keep the zombie numbers down.
The 2019 US population is estimated at 329 million. You could support maybe 329k zombies - but only if you control the zombie population strictly; every normal brain is harvested every year; and adults are culled early enough on while still reproducing. And none of that wouldn ever happen. And yet no one on the show ever thinks about the math. Because the writers don't have a good answer for that. If I were a character in the show, I'd be loudly talking about this all the time.
This is what being an active math major is like, apparently.
