New Blood

If vampires really existed, they’d replace the entire human race in 30 months, according to a paper written by physicists at the University of Central Florida and analyzed at the Collision Detection blog here. (Here’s the PDF of the study; hat tip to Rachel Sklar.)

Here’s the argument:

Anyone who has seen John Carpenter’s Vampires or the movie Blade or any of the host of other vampire films is already quite familiar with how the legend goes. The vampires need to feed on human blood. After one has stuck his fangs into your neck and sucked you dry, you turn into a vampire yourself and carry on the blood-sucking legacy. The fact of the matter is, if vampires truly feed with even a tiny fraction of the frequency that they are depicted to in the movies and folklore, then the human race would have been wiped out quite quickly after the first vampire appeared.

It’s a fun theory, but we all know that’s not how vampirism really works. Vampires don’t always turn out their victims; most often, they just suck their blood and kill them on the spot. Unless our distinguished horror and science-fiction literature has been lying to us all these years, it’s obvious that vampires are very choosy about the company they keep, since they’re stuck with any vampires they create for eternity.

But I wouldn’t expect a physics professor to have these insights into the undead world. For that, you need a guy who writes about weight lifting.

Tags: Tags: science