Have you ever found yourself watching The Walking Dead and wondering to yourself, 'Gee, enough with this rag tag group of people romping through the South. I want to know who else out there in the big wide world survived the zombie apocalypse!'
Well, Matt Lieberman over at SourceFed has put together this video attempting to answer that very important question.
View this video on YouTube
His first challenge was to pinpoint when the zombie outbreak started so he could get an accurate global population figure. Using technology featured in the prequel Fear The Walking Dead (like this iPad 2)...
And the jackets and winter clothing worn by the Los Angeles residents...
Lieberman is eventually able to pinpoint the outbreak to some time in January 2012, which he averages to Jan. 15. (Of course, he notes, this is pretty incredible given The Walking Dead premiered in 2010, but hey, you can't ignore those Apple products).
Lieberman then begins his math by using the estimated global population on Jan. 15, 2012: 6,986,951,000.
In the comics, creator Robert Kirkman established that zombies outnumbered humans by a ratio of 5,000:1.
That means this 1,397,390 people (or 0.0002% of the global population) are alive once the outbreak went global.
Using all the characters we've met on the show as an admittedly small sample group, Lieberman notes that of the 347 characters we've encountered, 252 have died.
That means 72.6% of people have died from the time the outbreak went global to the current Season 6 timeline of the show (which Lieberman pinpoints to early December 2013).
Which leaves us with a remaining earth population of just...
Oh, dear. That's...not that many. Sorry, guys. Good luck rebuilding civilization.
