Clearly, some sort of automation is needed. In this case I think it might be possible to create some sort of computerized matching system. If looking into each others’ eyes suffices to recognize one’s soul mate then there must be some visual clue, however subtle, that determines the match. Even if we don’t know exactly what, you could probably train a neural network to do the recognition: run eye images of all known matches (and an equal number of known mismatches) by the neural network and train it to give a positive result for matches. Then have it select prospective candidates and feed back the results to further refine the program. Eventually you should end up with a computer version of an idiot-savant matchmaker.
Of course even if you can quickly and reliably find matches, that’s only the beginning of your problems. If the distribution of soul mates is truly random, chances are better than even that one’s soul mate will be somewhere in the third world. If hundreds of millions of people in North America and western Europe demand to be with their loved ones, then you have huge immigration problems. Either the developed countries have to allow almost unlimited immigration from poorer nations, or people from rich countries would have to be willing for love’s sake to live in third world conditions. And imagine people used to and expecting freedom moving to China, or Christians to hard-core Islamic countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
There is hope!
Just to add to the Tim Minchin lyrics, there’s also Wreckless Eric:
When I was a young boy
My mama said to me
There’s only one girl in the world for you
And she probably lives in Tahiti
Oh my.
Now I am more than just a little depressed.
I find the guesstimate of 50,000 lifetime eye contacts phenomenally low. I probably did more than that in years of teaching, presenting at conferences, etc., alone.
Never mind going to a ball game and other events on a regular basis. And people who commute via mass transit in large cities are going to hit the jackpot.
But he missed the real issue: survival of the species. If we only reproduced with our soulmates, then the human population would be naturally low and restricted geographically. Meeting your soulmate in that situation would be far easier. Where would billions of humans spread over the globe have come from in the first place under these circumstances.
(Or humans, being humans, doing a lot of reproductive activity with non-soulmates. But what are the odds of that happening?)
I’m just squeeing over the fact that two of my idols are into eachother. I hope this boosts Tim Minchin’s popularity a bit, because his work is awesome.
If there’s such a thing as a “soul mate” it presupposes that there is such a thing as a soul. Which would be a huge argument in favor of a god; and, in fact, I’ve never hear the two ideas separated before now. So, obviously, the god who created your soul mate would ensure that you were able to find one another.
Nice job at comforting lonely Christians, miss elizabeth. Not kidding. I think that may be a comfort to them!
Has anyone else done the math on the Soul Roulette system?
I get: With a pool of singles N(d) on any given day, d, and a system that allows each person to look at L people per day, then we expect the odds of a particular person getting a match on any given day to be about L/N(d) (as long as L is significantly smaller than N(d)). And, over all N(d) people looking on a given day each having about L/N(d) chance of a match, we’d then expect about N(d) * L/N(d) = L matches on any given day, though since each match involves two people, actually L/2 matches per day. Since each match removes two people, we expect about L people removed each day (as long as L<< N(d) ).
Assuming 2 seconds per look, 8 hours per day, I get 14,400 looks per day. With an initial pool of 500,000,000 that’s 95 years to match everyone up (though it gets a little faster than this estimate towards the end). I don’t think the approximation of L<<N is going to make much of a difference until we’re down to the last few months.
Do people think Randall’s ‘a few decades’ really means 95 years (hey, same order of magnitude, which is close enough for XKCD) or can anyone see where we diverged?
There must be a range limitation to the effect, or else everyone would want to be an astronaut. “There she is, 500 miles left of Lake Baikal!”
Of course, even without that, being an astronaut would still be pretty cool.
How many people do you look in the eye at a ball game? Or on the train? Nobody looks each other in the eye on the DC Metro. That seems like a reasonable estimate to me.
So if I die alone, either there is no God, or He hates me?
(Not that those weren’t my options already…)
yeah - but what if your soulmate has a different soulmate - what are the odds of you being your soulmate’s soulmate?
Not necessarily. Maybe your soulmate did something to piss Him off.
I think the working definition of “soulmate” negates that possibility.
I already found my soulmate.
Sorry about the rest of you. 
I doubt I make eye contact with even ten new people on an average day. Yes, I see hundreds or thousands of people I’ve never seen before every day but actually the two of us looking each other in the eyes, very rarely.
But sure, maybe 50,000 is low but I doubt it is orders of magnitude low and so wouldn’t really change the broad math.
I’m sleeping with your soulmate, and I’m not going to introduce you two, sorry.
I love Ben Folds & Nick Hornby’s rather melancholic take on it, “From Above”, about soul mates constantly walking past each other…
*And years ago, at the movies, she sat behind him
A six-thirty showing of ‘While You Were Sleeping’
He never once looked around
It’s so easy from above
You can really see it all
People who belong together
Lost and sad and small
But there’s nothing to be done for them
It doesn’t work that way
Sure we all have soulmates
But we walk past them every day*
Or there’s The Whitlams’ joyous realisation:
She was one in a million, yeah…
So there’s five more, just in New South Wales!
(New South Wales being an Australian state with a population of about 6 million.)