Something fun for Halloween:
Zombie movies often depict a situation in which so much of the population has been zombified that the few remaining normal people have little or no chance to survive. But just how hard would it be to survive in comparison to set amounts of zombification?
This might sound, at first, like a useless discussion, but I think that few people have actually considered the figures.
For example, let's say that 80% of the population has been zombified. This is a very large portion of the population. But in fact, this means that only 4 out of 5, 4/5ths, of the population are zombies. If each normal person can kill or stop only 4 zombies, the zombie population can be easily eradicated. Surely killing 4 zombies doesn't sound that hard.
Someone could argue that if the zombie-causing influence was indiscriminate, such as a virus, that a portion of the people left would be those incapable of killing zombies (e.g. children, elderly, pacifists). However, the same is true of zombies in this case. A portion of the zombie population similar to the portion of non-zombie-killers should be zombies incapable of killing people. (Although pacifists turned zombie certainly could. Once again pacifists ruin it for all of us.)
The formula for determining the number of zombies each person would be responsible for killing, based on the percentage of the population zombified, is very simple. y=zombies/living=x/(100-x) where x is the percentage of the population zombified, and y is the number of zombies each person needs to kill.
The graph looks like...
As you can see from the graph, until the percentage of the population zombified gets VERY close to 100%, killing all the zombies should not be much trouble.
Keep in mind that as the percentage of the population zombified increases, the immediate access to resources such as gas and bullets actually increases. This is because in a survival situation, it's completely ethical to loot supplies (e.g. food, gas, weapons, ammunition) from those who are now zombies. Zombies can't use that stuff anyways.
Now, with this new-found confidence, have a safe and zombie-free Halloween!