14 DAY TRIAL // Not that this will ever happen, but as it turns out, the Rocky Mountains would be the safest place to hide to avoid having your brains eaten should a zombie apocalypse ever hit the US.
Or so argue a team of Cornell University researchers who have taken the time to model how a zombie apocalypse would play out in this corner of the world. Apparently, there is more to being a scientist than just staring at Petri dishes through a microscope.
How a zombie apocalypse would unfold in the US
In a paper detailing their work, the Cornell University specialists behind this investigation argue that, contrary to what Hollywood would have us believe, a zombie apocalypse would not engulf the entire US all of a sudden.
Thus, the researchers say that, although it is true that cities would fall fairly rapidly, it would take weeks for the zombies to make their way to the country's less densely populated regions.
Besides, it would be several months before the outbreak would hit mountainous regions. For this reason, folks looking to keep their brains inside their skulls and not have them eaten by zombies should hide in the Rockies.
By comparison, most movies and TV series imagine zombie apocalypses as hitting an entire country at the same time and turning everybody but a handful of survivors into undead beings with an appetite for human brains in just a few weeks.
“Our attempt to model zombies somewhat realistically, it doesn't seem like this is how it would actually go down,” Cornell University researcher Alex Alemi said in a statement, as cited by Science Daily.
Why study a zombie apocalypse that will never happen?
Truth be told, the chances that the US or any other country in the world will ever have a zombie apocalypse to deal with are slim to none. Hence, some might be wondering why anyone in their right mind would ever take the time to study such a fictional scenario.
The thing is that, although zombies are no more and no less a product of our imagination, plenty diseases that have the potential to kill thousands of people are as real as it gets.
Thus, when trying to determine how a zombie apocalypse would play out in the US, the Cornell University specialists behind this study actually researched and tested techniques for modeling how real diseases would progress in this corner of the world.
Simply put, this investigation was meant to shed new light on how an outbreak would affect the country. True, the disease that the study was based on is a fictitious one, but this does not make the researchers' findings about its progress any less accurate.