Re: Vampire dialogue again

On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Nik Taylor wrote:


 > Certainly the "bitten by a vampire, become a vampire"
 > scenario is illogical - if that were so, then the number of vampires
 > would increase exponentially (since everyone who becomes a vampire must
 > then drink the blood of others), until the entire world consisted of
 > nothing but vampires who would then starve to death.

Not necessarily.  In a vampire world, there must be some way to become
a primary vampire (one who has not been bitten by a vampire) even if
it is a low-probability process.  We would then expect to see vampirism
behave like Ebola -- very catching locally, leading to a lot of vampires
who then all starve, causing local extirpation until the next outburst.

But even if vampirism is not contagious, it is difficult to impossible
to maintain if victims are simply killed, as in Anne Rice.  Though
the growth is no longer exponential, it is still huge -- human beings
don't make good food animals, as they breed very slowly.

In the Sime~Gen novels of Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah
(http://www.simegen.com), where the vampirism is not of blood as such,
but of "life force", this phenomenon is known as "Zelerod's Doom",
after a mathematically-minded Sime (vampire) who first worked out the
inevitability of extirpation as the Sime population rises.

--
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