What If? Read Free Page A

starters, would your soul mate even still be alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion are alive now (which gives the human condition a 93 percent mortality rate). If we were all paired up at random, 90 percent of our soul mates would be long dead.

    Th at sounds horrible. But wait, it gets worse: A simple argument shows we can’t limit ourselves just to past humans; we have to include an unknown number of future humans as well. See, if your soul mate is in the distant past, then it also has to be possible for soul mates to be in the distant future. After all, your soul mate’s soul mate is.
    So let’s assume your soul matelives at the same time as you. Furthermore, to keep things from getting creepy, we’ll assume they’re within a few years of your age. ( Th is is stricter than the standard age-gap creepiness formula, 1 but if we assume a 30-year-old and a 40-year-old can be soul mates, then the creepiness rule is violated if they accidentally meet 15 years earlier.) With the same-age restriction, most of us wouldhave a pool of around half a billion potential matches.
    But what about gender and sexual orientation? And culture? And language? We could keep using demographics to try to narrow things down further, but we’d be drifting away from the idea of a random soul mate. In our scenario, you wouldn’t know anything about who your soul mate was until you looked into their eyes. Everybody would have onlyone orientation: toward their soul mate.
    Th e odds of running into your soul mate would be incredibly small. Th e number of strangers we make eye contact with each day can vary from almost none (shut-ins or people in small towns) to many thousands (a police officer in Times Square), but let’s suppose you lock eyes with an average of a few dozen new strangers each day. (I’m pretty introverted,so for me that’s definitely a generous estimate.) If 10 percent of them are close to your age, that would be around 50,000 people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you would find true love only in one lifetime out of 10,000.

    With the threat of dying alone looming so prominently, society could restructure to try to enable as much eye contact as possible. We could put together massive conveyer belts to move lines of people past each other . . . 

     . . . but if the eye contact effect works over webcams, we could just use a modified version of ChatRoulette.

    If everyone used the system for eight hours a day, seven days a week, and if it takes you a couple of seconds to decide if someone’s your soul mate, this system could — in theory — match everyone up with their soul mates in a few decades. (I modeled a few simple systems to estimate how quickly people would pair off and drop out of the singles pool. If you want to try to work throughthe math for a particular setup, you might start by looking at derangement problems.)
    In the real world, many people have trouble finding any time at all for romance — few could devote two decades to it. So maybe only rich kids would be able to afford to sit around on SoulMateRoulette. Unfortunately for the proverbial 1 percent, most of their soul mates would be found in the other 99 percent.If only 1 percent of the wealthy used the service, then 1 percent of that 1 percent would find their match through this system — one in 10,000.
    Th e other 99 percent of the 1 percent 2 would have an incentive to get more people into the system. Th ey might sponsor charitable projects to get computers to the rest of the world — a cross between One Laptop Per Child and OKCupid. Careers like “cashier”and “police officer in Times Square” would become high-status prizes because of the eye contact potential. People would flock to cities and public gathering places to find love — just as they do now.
    But even if a bunch of us spent years on SoulMateRoulette, another bunch of us managed to hold jobs