Soul mates? iKu2e shows us the math

Guest post by iKu2e. Many thanks to him for allowing me this. This essay is the last in his five part series on soul mates. My comment, when I first read it was:

Thank you for using mathematics to show how full of crap we are. I just had a thought, before reading this post, that the current system of dating is based on pride and lust. If only we knew that the reason we’re going to be miserable in relationships is that we’re trying to reach a statistical goal that’s unattainable.

iKu2e is a thoughtful, feeling man. He’s an engineer and he writes poetry. It is a tough read if you are math averse, but you are smart people so I would like you to please try to get to the bottom of it. For my part, instead of bombarding indifferent others with my feelings, I am going to be kind to the people who truly love me. Embracing them is a sensible plan.

Soul mates – Part V

A mathematical study of how many soul mates you have on this earth
by iKu2e

This is my last post on the Soul Mates Research. I had no idea of soul mates before starting this research and now I am back to the state where I was. I explain why! What is a soul mate? The people around say there is one soul which was created for you. If you are the one thinking the same, stop it!

If you have one soul for you on the earth which is same as like yours, then the 50% of the people on the earth would be the soul mates of the other 50%, which seems to be a funny idea. The total number of people on the earth while I write is 7,300,757,312. Males and females percentage is 50.4% and 49.6% respectively.

None of the religions talk about soul mates, rather they give more importance to the single soul. All of them try to elevate each soul to the next level and give them a better place on the earth. World mythologies, yes they talk a lot about the soul mates as I described in Part II of this series.

Psychologists they just give opinions based on surveys, which is basically the idea of the people. There is no soul which exactly same as you or me, but there might be a 99.99% matching soul. Though this soul is matching yours, it might not help you achieve your purpose.

Out of 7,300,757,312 souls, that is 1.369720916974373e-8 % or 0.00000001369720916974373% is the percentage of people on the earth whom you are looking for. Still do you believe that you can meet that person?

But we can make some calculation to find out the number of soul mates for each soul on the earth. Remember, each soul can have many soul mates, not only one. If you believe in only one soul mate you are with the above percentage of people and don’t move on, you are free to go and search for that 0.00000001369720916974373% of people on the earth which I believe impossible in this lifetime.

There are many hypotheses that can be used to calculate the best match for your soul, but they relate to love. You do not have to be soul mates to be in a romantic relationship. That is the reason why I don’t want to use those hypotheses here. Let us assume that each soul mate shares some preferences / characters common to its soul mate. You want to meet every person for at least 1 seconds to decide if he/she is your soul mate.

In total, you need 7,300,757,312 seconds which is 231.35197997422 years on the earth. Do you think you can live 231 years on the earth?

Check your average age of your country and let’s limit the soul mate calculation within your age limit. Life expectancy of the world population varies from 85 years to 38 years. Considering that you live to the max age of 85 years:

231 years will be split into 231/85 = 2.717647058823529 times where the whole population also can be split into 2.717647058823529 times.

So you will be able to meet only 7,300,757,312/2.717647058823529 = 2686425850 people on the earth in the 85 years of your life.

2686425850 people into seconds into years = 85 Years! The highest life expectancy of the people on the earth! To further filter the people to meet your soul mate, Let us do this way, You can define the number of characters/preferences you expect in your soul mate:

Preferences or p = It might be 1,2,3,4,……n of characters/preferences.

You have p number of characteristics and you expect ‘k’ number of people.

Number of people matching your preferences = k

p = number of preferences, k = number of people who meet your demands

Assuming all the people have the same no of preferences, we have to find out a solution to match the demands to each other and find out the best matches. Using Binary logarithm of mathematics, where we assume the people in 2 dimensional array, we can find out the number of matching soul mates:

n+k*n = n*log2(k*n)

n = 2686425850 , number of people you have to meet in the 85 years of your life.

Solving this equation gives the value of ‘k’ as 35.4716 which can be taken as whole value of 35!

So you have 35 soul mates on the earth which can you meet in 85 years among 2,686,425,850 people.

There are lot of assumptions in the solution! We considered people as two dimensional data because each person has their own preferences and the person who is seeking his/her soul mate has his own set of preferences which has to be compared against each person in the dating pool of 2,686,425,850 persons. So it’s up to you accept it.

iKu2e