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.
New Scientist describes how Backus used a similar equation to estimate the number of university educated, age-appropriate women who he finds physically attractive that he should expect to find in his environs:
He calculates that there are 10,510 people in the UK that satisfy these basic criteria. That amounts to 0.00017% of the UK’s population, or 0.0014% of Londoners. As he says, that “doesn’t seem so bad” – especially if, as Londonist notes, he actually socialises in groups that are biased towards his own age and education level, which seems likely.
But the calculations aren’t over. Backus also estimates that only 1 in 20 women in his potential dating pool will find him attractive (a percentage he calls “depressingly low”), only half are single, and he only gets along with 1 in 1o. Once those factors are taken into account, his number of potential girlfriends shrinks to… 26 women.
Yikes. It looks like single men have only a slightly better chance of of finding a girlfriend than they do of finding an intelligent alien society in the sky.
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