It's not in the stars

Who would have thought that it is as difficult to find true love as it is to find, well, ET in your backyard. Not the ET delivered at your doorstep or desk every morning , but that strange creature most often seen in close encounters of the James Cameron kind these days, if not Steven Spielberg and Raakesh Roshan.

As we know from their movies, and occasional blips on space telescopes probing the universe, there must be someone or something out there; but now it seems that the average lonely heart pining away on a London park bench has about as much chance of hearing the echo of a kindred soul as scientists are of getting an accurate census of ETs in deep space. A British university professor has calculated that he has a 1 in 285,000 chance of finding love, using the same equation by which scientists are trying to ascertain how many ETs are out there.

Using the mathematical theorem the US astrophysicist Frank Drake devised in the early 1960s, this professor, who lives on a boat, went searching for his ideal match but found that there were just 10,500 women in all of Britain who fulfilled his modest criteria of being London-based , between 24-34 , with a university education — markedly close to Drake’s estimate of the 10,000 or so potential communicative civilisations along the Milky Way.

Calculations showed that a mere 0.14% of Londoners and 0.017% of Britons met his standards, and if the other variable in the potential relationship (the women) turned out to be as nitpicking, the chances of finding a perfect match narrowed to 0.00034 %.

The moral of this story, however, lies in what happened next: despite the odds, the finicky professor found love right at his doorstep, and has begun dating a neighbour who not only meets his criteria but even lives on a boat. So the lesson is, look no further than that trusted ET on your doorstep everyday and don’t waste time hankering after the unknown ETs that may be floating light years away on the edge of another galaxy!