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Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Uhm, dude, have you ever watched British tv? Now, I love a girl with a sexy British accent and I've seen (and met) some incredibly hot British girls, but the average British girl is at least a whole notch lower than the average American girl. So if you say that the average American girl is a 5, then in the UK the average is a 4.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
This isn't a known number
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
This isn't a known number, extrapolating from the known systems isn't very reliable, for reference see biology
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
ok now you are just guessing. Our system seems to have 3 or more potentials. So what, you are going to apply that to every other solar system you project to find in the galaxy?
f = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
go ahead and predict your d&d dice rolls while your at it. While of course there exists a percent (total planets/ total life). But hello, you don't know the total life, or planets for that matter. So you are just conjecturing.
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
You base this number off of what again? You don't exactly have a good sample size here considering the size of the numbers.
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space
Conjecture. Besides even if the math was known and prefect, it's still just based on probabilities. I.E, if you took the billions of galaxies, a high percent of them would have the prefect math outcome, but many many would not.
On to the FA idle math play, while he knows many more of the numbers, he also makes several assumptions. "fB = The fraction of university educated, ageappropriate women in London who I find physically attractive."
While the first 3 numbers are easily known, the " % who I find physically attractive" is just conjecture. Even if you did a study with him with 100 random women, and he liked 15% of them, that doesn't mean it would be 15% of university educated, ageappropriate women in London, maybe that subset is uglier or pretty then the larger group.
Feel free to go ahead and nitpick about how I don't understand math, how else will I learn, but the basic idea's that it's based on assumptions and bad probability math remain.
He's a economic student too. I have great respect for economics in academia, but not so much for actual economists. Partly because they love to talk about econ formulas similar to this that turn out to be wrong as often as they are right.
but what I really want to say is the Drake equation is bullshit.