Extraterrestrial dating statistics
I’m hunting for a new girlfriend; the sooner I find a new one, the better. But I work in fields where there aren’t a lot of eligible single women. I’ll work out the statistics of finding eligible single women, using the same technique as an estimation of the number of civilizations in our galaxy.
The way it works for galaxies is to multiply the percentage of sun-like stars by the percentage of those that might have planet orbiting where water can exist in three phases, then multiply by the percentage of those that might have terrestrial-style surfaces, and so forth.
I’m not saying that eligible single women whom I would be interested in dating, and who would be reciprocally interested in dating me, are as rare as advanced civilizations might be in our galaxy. But the same approach can be used to get some estimate of how large the target population might be in a metropolitan area the size of Denver, where I live.
So here’s the approach. First, one thinks about all of the bottleneck factors that narrow or reduce the desirability of dating. These include: gender, marital status, age, race, religion, educational level, financial situation, and mutual physical attraction. Having found multiplicative estimates for all of these factors, one takes the product of all of the numbers and multiplies by total population. The result is the likely number of women who are potential life companions.
OK, let’s begin. Here is my cascading table:
Factor Estimated multiplicative factor
---------- -----------------------------
gender 0.5
-----------------------------------------------------------
age bracket
(for me, say 35-50) 0.125
-----------------------------------------------------------
single 0.2
-----------------------------------------------------------
actively searching for
someone like me 0.125
-----------------------------------------------------------
race 1.0
-----------------------------------------------------------
non-religious or not
strongly religious 0.5
-----------------------------------------------------------
college educated 0.5
-----------------------------------------------------------
finances OK 0.4
-----------------------------------------------------------
physically attractive 0.3
-----------------------------------------------------------
not insane, not overly
inhibited, not overly
weird, not suffering from
personality disorders or
alcoholism, etc. 0.25
-----------------------------------------------------------
In other words, of all the population of all people who live in the Denver area, one first multiplies by 0.5 to get down to just the females. Then one multiplies that by 1/8 (0.125) for the fraction of females who are in my reasonable age bracket, then one multiplies that by 1/5 (0.2) for the number of single women in that age bracket, and so on, until arriving at the final fractional answer. Just as with estimates of the number of civilizations in a galaxy, the multiplicative factors have to be estimated, and they should be estimated conservatively so as to low-ball the final result. That is, the goal of this exercise is to reach a pessimistic result.
The product of all of these factors as listed above is 0.000012, or 1.2 times ten to the power of minus 5. This is equal to 12 times ten to the power of minus 6, or 12 women per million people. Let’s round the number off to a nice simple order of magnitude value (which physicists like me like to use), namely about ten women per million people.
Conservatively, that is, I estimate that there are ten women per million people in this area who are actively looking for someone to be with, who would like to be with me, and whom I would reciprocally want to be with and would find attractive, and for whom there wouldn’t be any significant barriers of age, education, utter weirdness, clinical personality disorders, alcoholism, etc.
On the face of it, ten women per million people sounds like pretty poor odds. But it’s actually not too bad at all, because there are about a million people in the Denver area. That means that, conservatively, there are around (about) ten women who are prime candidates, and who would likewise consider me to be a prime candidate, for a strong long-term romantic relationship. I found one of them by accident eight years ago, the only hitch being that she was seventeen years younger than me. Now I just have to work out a method for finding some more women like that, in my age range, more quickly and more methodically.
Where and how?
I hope that this web site will help. It should work as a filter against me (and it’s intended to work as a filter against me). It should hopefully allow women who might be interested in me to get some idea of what I’m like without even having to meet me first. For that reason, I’ve tried to present myself in an unvarnished way on the site. If a woman gets scared by what she sees there, if she finds me unattractive as a person or a personality, or whatever, then she won’t waste my time and I won’t waste hers in any useless dating exercises. That’s a win-win for all of us. Conversely, if some woman looks at me on this web site and thinks, “Wow! He seems fantastic! I’d sure like to meet him,” then we can at least move on to the next steps of learning what we’re each like without being hung up on some of the more elementary issues that can arise when you have first met someone and you know absolutely nothing about them.
By the way, I think that you have to know someone for at least a year, and you need to travel with them under some stressful circumstances, to even begin to learn what they’re really like as people.
My estimated odds on finding an excellent woman are much better than finding a civilization in this galaxy. Most estimates on the civilization question are about 1 in 100 billion. Since there are only 100 billion stars in our galaxy, this means that we’re probably the one in 100 billion--we’re probably the only advanced civilization in the Milky Way.
My conservatively estimated odds of ten women per million people are exactly one million times better than that.
The statistics of looking for a new girlfriend ought to be calculable on a similar basis to the computations for the probability of finding extraterrestrial life in a galaxy. Lets give it a try...
M-31 (Andromeda) galaxy and its small satellite galaxy, photographed by Frank Sanders 2006.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
The extraterrestrial statistics of hunting for a new girlfriend
