How much of the population would still be alive in The Walking Dead (according to maths)

Imagine it. You’re a super smart member of the human race, the proud owner of the type of brain that Einstein himself would bow down in front of.

What do you do? Work out the solution to world peace? Master time travel? Or, calculate how many people are still alive in the fictional world of a cult television show?

We’re going to save you a lot of effort and tell you that in this instance it’s the latter, and the man in question is Matt Lieberman, who believes that we can safely assume there are only 382,885 humans left alive in the world of The Walking Dead.

A very disconcerting number for any of the fictional survivors thinking they’re in with a chance of pulling through but let’s not let that distract from the real cool stuff here - the math used (never thought we’d write that) by Lieberman to figure it out.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Here’s how it breaks down:

First things first, we need a rough date for when the outbreak in the show originally happened. Based upon evidence spotted throughout the show, like the use of certain technology (an iPad 2 for example), coupled with other factors like the leaves on trees or how none of the Los Angeles-based characters wear winter clothes, this would appear to be roughly, January 2012.

And this is where it gets clever...

The global population during this specific period of time was 7 billion, this we know as a fact because of, well, real life. Now, according to the graphic novels the ‘walkers’ outnumbered the actual humans by a ratio of 5,000:1. So, if this is accurate, we can assume that this leaves us with around 1.4 million people that haven’t turned into zombies at around the time of the initial outbreak. 

Still with us? Good.

Because this is where it gets really ingenious. Lieberman then counts up all of the characters that we’ve met throughout the various seasons and spin-offs, 347, and then the amount of deaths we’ve seen, all 252 of the bloody things. Using these two figures it’s possible to guestimate that almost three quarters of the entire earth’s population would have conceivably died in a zombie mess.

Leaving us with… 382,885 people that are still alive at present day Walking Dead time. See it explained in more detail here.