Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Killjoy Was Here

[posted by Callimachus]

Dentists who already have enough money and some Christian fundamentalists have been waging war against Halloween for a long time. They should just sit back and leave it to the killjoys of science.

On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on.

If mortality rates were taken into consideration, the population would disappear much faster. Even an unrealistically high reproduction rate couldn't counteract this effect.