How might the balance between vampires and humans play out? Atlas Obscura does a service to the wondering Infocult reader by summarizing the findings of multiple scholarly papers.
According to the first scenario, the Stoker-King model—based on vampires as delineated in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot—80 percent of the human population would be exterminated within the first 165 days of initial vampiric activity. “The model analyzed in this scenario is very similar to an epidemic outbreak caused by a deadly virus,” said the authors. They also noted that, based on the daily feeding that Stoker and King’s vampires appear to require, it would take just two months for the number of global vampires to jump from one to 4,000.
The second scenario, the Rice model, is based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, in which a feeding vampire does not necessarily kill a person, but “can attack a human being, feed on it and leave it to live.” Despite the not-necessarily-lethal approach, the model still predicts the total extinction of humanity within 50 years from the first vampire attack.
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