Some silly professor is claiming that vampires cannot possibly be real based on simple logic. According to WMTW,
The professor [University of Central Florida physicist Costas Efthimiou] took out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one person’s blood each month, after a couple of years there would be no people left, just vampires. He started his calculations with just one vampire and 537 million humans on Jan. 1, 1600 and showed that the human population would be down to zero by July 1602.
But that’s assuming there’s no predation of the vampires by humans. Um, yeah:
It also assumes that every vampire bite leads to the creation of another vampire, but this is not a universally held view of vampires. In fact Brian Thomas, PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford, already covered this in his paper, Vampire Ecology in the Jossverse which outlines how the human and vampire populations can co-exist and reach a stable equilibrium given relatively high predication by a kick-ass slayer and a vampire mythos where vampires only rarely produce additional vampires (on average each vampire creates only one additional vampire per year in the Buffyverse).
Maybe the only way to resolve this is to turn the folks on Mythbusters into vampires and see if they can give a definitive answer.
Sources:
Vampire Population Ecology. Brian Thomas, Accessed: October 31, 2006.
Vampires, Ghosts Aren’t Real, Says Physicist. WMTW.Com, October 27, 2006.