If
a vampire must feed on human blood, how long would it take a certain
number of vampires to wipe out the human population? And if those human
victims then turned to vampires, how soon would vampires outnumber
humans? Mathematical modeling turned to the world of the supernatural as
a surprising number of researchers have tackled the complexities of
human and vampire coexistence. A 1982 paper by Richard Hartl and
Alexander Mehlmann titled "The Transylvanian Problem of Renewable
Resources" took a look at how vampires would affect the human
population.
In doing so, they divided vampires into
three categories: the "asymptotically satiated vampire," the "blood
maximizing vampire," and the "unsatiable vampire." Regardless of the
type of vampire, though, they found that bloodsuckers can't help but
face diminishing resources:
"[W]e are facing a typical
consumption-resource trade off. The vampire society derives utility from
consumption of blood but in sucking the blood of a human being and in
turning him to a vampire the resource of human beings is reduced whereas
the number of vampires is increased. Both of these effects diminish the
resource of humans per vampire curtailing future possibilities of
consumption."
However, a 2007 article modeled a
vampire apocalypse and concluded that “vampires would eliminate humans
within three years.” Which provoked a refutation in 2008. More research
has been done, but the results vary according to which vampire mythology
one ascribes to. Are the vampires in Bram Stoker’s universe more
dangerous than those in Anne Rice’s universe? What about the vampires in
the worlds of
Twilight or
The Historian? Read
an overview of the available research at Atlas Obscura.
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