Why I don’t have a girlfriend:
An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK
Peter Backus

The Drake Equation is used to estimate the number of highly evolved civilisations that might exist in our galaxy.  I have used this approach to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. 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. Find out the details here. 

Here are some articles on my paper.

Asylum.com

Fox News

Australia

Some BBC Blog

Using the Drake Equation in this way is a fairly obvious thing to do. Others have done it before me and I encourage people to check out these examples:

Tristan Miller did it in 1999!

Here is a message board from 2007 talking about this idea.

On the radio show 'This American Life'

On the TV show 'The Big Bang Theory'

A version (much better than mine) by Raymond Francis who is a graduate student in space mission design (Awesome, awesome discipline!)

Diego Trujillo wrote a very encouraging response outlining why we will have girlfriends. Also (for spanish speakers) check out his website.

Shoaib Malik wrote a poem about it.

If you know of others, please email me!