If you are a single male, please answer the following questions:
Repellent body odor? No?
Superfluous and abundant body hair?
Socially awkward? No again…?
Then why are you still single? And what are the odds of you finding a girlfriend this year?
Economics grad student Peter Backus of the U.K.’s University of Warwick pondered that question, and put his mathematical skills to good use to calculate his chances of hooking up in 2010. As Backus found, the odds of him finding an appropriate love interest on any given night out are 1 in 285,000. Backus used the Drake equation to calculate these odds of finding love and wrote it up as “Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK.”
As New Scientist explains:
For the uninitiated, the Drake equation was set out by Frank Drake, one of the founders of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It estimates the number of alien civilisations we should expect to find in our galaxy.