In the post-apocalyptic vampire movie I Am Legend, Will Smith hangs a left into Times Square and finds himself face to face with a gazelle. He aims his rifle but the gazelle disappears into a row of corn growing out of cracked pavement. He finds the gazelle again, but as he aims at dinner, it’s mauled by a lion.
It has not been a good day.
His watch beeps to remind him to be home in his Greenwich Village brownstone by sunset. He cooks himself dinner out of canned food. He sleeps with his dog in his bathtub.
As the last human survivor left on Manhattan Island, Smith worries that he’ll be found by the vampire hordes that roam the night. They live in packs dominated by an Alpha Male.
They eat raw flesh when they can find it.
They killed every other human being in the city.
It has not been a good year for humanity.
But as Smith falls asleep cradling his assault rifle like a body pillow, the question begs, if he were to go out and shoot every remaining vampire in Manhattan: How many vampires are they’re really left in Manhattan?
The FDA’s Recommended Daily Allowance of Blood
Vampires eat. They would have to. Even if we accept the premise that they’re a mutant race of animals, as long as they were animals, and therefore subject to the laws of physics, they would need food.
A vampire, like all other animals, like ourselves, is a thermodynamic device. A cold-blooded, ruthless, one, but a thermodynamic device nonetheless. It must take in high-energy food, capture that energy, then release the excess as low-energy waste.
In this sense, there is nothing that makes a vampire particularly different than another cold-blooded predator: the Tyrannosaurus rex.
They’re both vicious, carnivores. They have no weapons to hunt with, just their physical abilities. They bite as their primary attacks. And rely on strength and shark teeth instead of poison or stealth or grace.
A T-rex, of course, to survive needs to eat. It would stand to reason, of course, that a vampire needs to eat too.
Now, a T-rex was a big animal, and it hunted other big animals. We don’t know for sure exactly what it ate (or even know for sure that it was a predator and not a scavenger) we know that any animal that size has to take in a lot of energy.
Plants receive their energy from the sun. Animals get their energy from plants. And some animals from these other animals that eat the plant.
Vampires are carnivores. And in order for carnivores to survive they need meat.
But what kind of meat are vampires eating?
People. Soylent Green is people!
The vampires eat humans. And since Manhattan was full of humans, millions of them, the vampire population would have gorged themselves on humans.
For awhile.
No matter how many humans Manhattan had, given any period of time, the vampires would eventually have eaten them all. That is, presumably, the point in the story that found Will Smith driving around midtown.
And once the humans were all eaten up, the good times would dry out.
There’d be less and less people to eat, and the vampire population would begin to starve.
Now the human population of Manhattan is kept alive by the constant stream of agricultural products.
But vampires don’t farm.
They don’t open diners. They don’t have bodegas.
They just hunt. They’re lions. Or they’re a T. rex.
And given that after a period of time there’d be no humans left to eat, how exactly would a vampire survive?
The Fifth Avenue Savannah
If the post-apocalyptic future happens, and corn really did grow out of the pavement, how many lions would Manhattan support?
Not many.
On the savannah, the constant growth of grass leads to the constant eating of that grass by herd animals, which leads to the constant breeding of herd animals. Which are constantly eaten by predators.
And the predators die and become grass.
It’s the circle of life.
But New York would not be a good place for a savannah. It’s too far north, so vegetation dries out for months of winter. The skyscrapers block out the sun. And there’s not much topsoil for crops.
For sure, vegetation would take over New York City again if all the people left. But it wouldn’t be the right vegetation to reproduce the Serengeti.
Even if a lion did find its way to this future New York, it probably wouldn’t like it there.
But would a vampire?
Probably not. There'd be very little for the vampire to eat. If New York became a real jungle, then carnivores would disappear. In the real jungles of, say, Africa, the largest animals are ones that feed off the vegetation--gorillas and chimpanzees. Sure chimpanzees hunt monkeys sometimes, but that's a very small percentage of their diet.
Without a savannah-like environment, there wouldn't be many carnivore-like animals.
So with no humans left to eat, and not many large animals either, how many vampire hordes would Will Smith have to avoid?
Not many.
In a manner of a couple of months, every vampire in Manhattan would starve to death. Or they’d shrink to a population small enough to feed off of the few dozen antelopes that trek on through midtown.
There certainly wouldn’t be enough vampires to overwhelm Smith if he had a good shooting position and a fully loaded assault weapon.
If Smith did survive the first year of the vampire reign on New York, he could probably take his time getting home for dinner.
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