Bad news for single men: the odds of you finding an appropriate girlfriend on any given night out are 1 in 285,000, New Scientist's Michael Marshall says.
At any rate, that's the conclusion of Peter Backus of the University of Warwick, UK, who carried out a tongue-in-cheek calculation of his 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".
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.
It's quite simple. You just multiply these numbers together:
* The average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
* The fraction of those stars that have planets
* The average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
* The fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
* The fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
* The fraction of civilisations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
* The length of time such civilisations release detectable signals into space.
Backus' calculation relies on the same idea, but he uses these numbers instead:
* The rate of formation of people in the UK (i.e. population growth)
* The fraction of people in the UK who are women
* The fraction of women in the UK who live in London
* The fraction of the women in London who are age-appropriate
* The fraction of age-appropriate women in London with a university education
* The fraction of university educated, age-appropriate women in London who he finds physically attractive
* The length of time in years that he has been alive thus making an encounter with a potential girlfriend possible.
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.
However, there's a snag in the form of three more factors, which slash the group of women he could conceivably go out with:
* Only 1 in 20 of the women find him attractive
* Only half are single (and this proportion falls with increasing age)
* He only gets along with 1 in 10.
Once these are taken into account, the pool of potential girlfriends shrinks to a mere 26: hence the appalling odds.
Now it's very important to note that those last three figures are entirely subjective and not backed by empirical data.
For instance, Backus could improve his estimate of the proportion of women who find him attractive by analysing his major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a key component of the immune system.
It's well established that people are more likely to be attracted to individuals with different MHCs, perhaps because any offspring are likely to have a more diverse, and thus more effective, immune system.
So a useful additional term for the Drake-Backus equation would be the number of people who have a different MHC to the individual. Some measures of his own physical symmetry and face shape could also help clarify how many women would find him attractive.
If the results from that improved calculation aren't encouraging, Backus would be well advised to expand his sample size to the entire human population (currently estimated at 6,796,355,426). With numbers like that, as comedian Tim Minchin has pointed out, the odds really do look good.
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