For thousands of years, man has cowered in terror of the night as the vampire has prowled cat-like through the shadows; in attempting to thwart the vampire menace, mankind has employed its utmost ingenuity.
For example, the culinary arts explored the role of garlic in cuisine, largely to help stave off the risks of frenching a vampire. Ballistics? Every advance in the field has been aimed at perfecting the laser-guided, stake-firing rocket launcher. The fluorescent light? A vampire-melting simulacrum of the sun, which also happens to be good at bleaching the autonomy out of our nation's office drones.
Yet all of these technological advances have proven fruitless against the threatening storm of a vampire apocalypse. So thank god for Professor Costas Efthimiou, who has used a new invention — math — to eradicate vampires once and for all. How's he done that? Ingeniously, by proving they never existed to begin with.
Efthimiou's theory: let's assume that vampires sprang into being in the year 1700, when the population of Earth was 536,870,911. If a single vampire bit just one person a night, transforming each person it bit into a vampire, and each new vampire bit an extra person a night, then the world would have been overrun by vampires by July 1602. The existence of even a single vampire would cause an exponential explosion of the freakish, blood-sucking undead.
Frankly, I remain unconvinced. Perhaps vampires are merely far-sighted enough to realize that completely eliminating the global food supply within two years isn't a good long-term growth strategy for the future of the species. Vampires may very well be agricultural pragmatists.
What mankind really needs is for Professor Costas Efthimiou to abandon his federally funded "vampires don't exist" research and turn his attention to something more in the nation's interests. I suggest an algebraic theorem disproving the existence of Godzilla, because if that guy turns out to be real, we'll need all the vampires we can get — wave after wave of kamikaze blood suckers — to throw at him.
Vampires a Mathematical Impossibility, Scientist Says [Yahoo News]
