Blessed by the Potato

Email, that most vital of life blood of the Internets, is the one thing that should never fail us. Imagine the chaos as millions of email junkies realize that if they want to ensure that a message gets somewhere that they’ll have to pick up the phone and verify it the old-fashioned way.

Barbaric!

Unfortunately, my email server has been inexplicably been dropping messages seemingly at random, and it has me really worried. I’m a real email junkie, and have been since I first got internet access. Earlier today, I was poo-pooing call waiting, asking why anyone would want to pay for the priviledge of having the phone constantly go boo-woop while you’re talking to one person, then risk losing that connection to placate the new caller. If someone really needs to reach me while I’m on the phone, I said, they can call my cell phone or email me. Yet all of a sudden, it feels like that cornerstone of my life is starting to shatter.

Sure, email’s known to have the odd problem here and there. Sometimes messages get stuck in transit between mail servers, often arriving hours and in extreme cases, days after they were sent, rather than the delay of seconds we’re used to. Sometimes it gets bounced entirely after a few days in the queue, or it may be caught in the spam filter. But it’s always somewhere if you care to look — if someone were to send a follow-up email or ask you in person if you got their email, and you had to say that no, you hadn’t, you could try to check up on it. If it didn’t land in your spam folder, then there’s a good chance the sender got a return receipt telling them that their email bounced.

However, I’ve had at least 2 people over the last week tell me that they sent me email that I never got (amounting to 5 emails between them). They never got a return receipt, either, which suddenly has me worried about the utility of my email. And if email becomes suspect then what’s next? I fear my entire universe will come crashing down around my shoulders leaving me with nothing but a hunk of graphite and a pack of stamps, and even that might get lost! In fact, it seems to happen more than with email — in January I had an express post package get lost, despite showing up as delivered on their tracker.

So I had this really weird dream last night that the Fraser Institute was out to get me. They started by sending a bunch of annoying and harrassing letters to my parents’ house, followed by teams of snipers. I was yelling “why does the Fraser Institute have my home address? And why are they trying to kill me?!” The weird part was that the letters were mostly written on the inside of the envelopes they sent, so I’d open one up and sigh thinking it was empty, and then there’d be this writing on the inside…

I have to wonder if this is yet another indication that I’ve completely lost my marbles, or if it’s my subconscious trying to tell me something about the danger of conservative think-tanks…

The Fermi Paradox is a very neat concept when considering extraterrestrial life. It goes, quite simply, like this: “Where are they?” If life is abundant in the universe, and the natural goal for any technologically developed civilization is to spread to the stars (not only expanding for expansion’s sake, but also spreading out so that a global catastrophy doesn’t wipe out the species), then why have we not yet seen any evidence of extraterrestrial life? Our knowledge of Von Neumann probes, exponential growth, etc., tells us that by all rights they should be crawing all over us by now. Even if the odds are low that life will form, and lower yet that they’ll become intelligent, the galaxy is a really big place and there’s been enough time. So, are we the first? While someone would have to be first, it seems like that’s about as likely as us being the only life in the universe. Could we just not be looking for evidence in the right way? That’s entirely possible: while we’ve been beaming out huge amounts of radio for the last century or so, we’re starting to replace a lot of those communications with point-to-point microwaves and fibre optics. It might be that a civilization only bothers with broadcast radio (that can penetrate the ionosphere) for a few hundred years, and after that settles down to more energy-efficient, clearer, point-to-point transmissions (or even faster-than-light tachyon type communication). But what about their physical presence? Even a totallitarian galactic government imposing some sort of Star Trek-like non-interference Prime Directive couldn’t keep every religious nutjob or escaped prisoner from trying to touch down on Earth (and indeed, this happened quite a bit on Star Trek).

I’ve been reading Permanence lately, and they have another take on the matter (similar to the inevitable biological/nuclear holocaust type scenario)… but that’s actually something to talk about another time. No, today I’m not really going to talk about aliens, I’m going to talk about love.

The Fermi Paradox of Love

I’ve come up with a version of the Fermi Paradox that goes like this: if there are billions of people on the Earth, and more people being born than we can hope to comfortably sustain, then where are our mates? We’re getting close to the age at which we’d like to start having kids, and despite keeping an eye out for the better part of a decade, talking to thousands of people, and possibly dating some… we still find ourselves asking the question “where are they?”

If we’re meant to have one and only one soulmate, then why hasn’t the Potato or Flying Spaghetti Monster pushed them towards us with Its all-knowing tentacle? And if that’s just a silly romantic notion, why haven’t we managed to find someone who, while not perfect, is certainly close enough? If there are plenty of fish in the sea, where are they?

Now, I’m no Drake, but I could potentially throw out some variables anyway. Let’s say that the number of ideal candidates for you is N. Then, we can determine an approximate value of N by:

N = P · G · A · L · S · C · D

Where
P = total population of the planet
G = portion of population that is of the appropriate gender and orientation
A = portion within your age bracket who are available
L = portion who meet your gross limits (the sort of things you could filter out with a simple questionnaire, eliminating those who may have tatoos, drive drunk, molest children, vote conservative, smoke, or otherwise not meet whatever personal, non-negotiable limits you may have)
S = the smacktard quotient; in other words, the proportion who seem ok when you first meet them, but turn out to be utter smacktards when you get to know them a little bit (acutally, mathematically it’s the number of people who aren’t smacktards, so 1 – % of smacktards)
C= portion who meet your more subtle requirements (the ones you may not even be conscious of — the sort of things that you only find out about after you get to know someone fairly well, in other words, your compatability)
D = the “dumb luck” modifier, which includes factors such as happening to meet someone if they do exist, not having something traumatic happen at a bad point in the relationship (for example, getting a new job in another city while the relationship is too young to ask someone to move with you, or turn down the opportunity for them, or to sustain extended periods in long-distance limbo; or having your ex call in the middle of your third date wanting to get back together)

Taking a rough estimate, we have:
P = 6 billion
G = 45% (the gender part is easier than trying to guess what proportion also meets the orientation part)
A = 5% (assume that about 10% of total people are in the proper age bracket, and about half of those are available)
L = 20% (sounds about right, but who knows)
S = 25% (I think this is probably still being generous)
C = 5% (this one’s hard to judge, but I think that of the people who were in my age group, available, met my gross criteria, weren’t smacktards after getting to know them a bit, only about 1 in 20 would be compatable enough to keep trying with)
D = (assuming no other dumb luck, let’s say you meet 60 000 people in the “looking out” phase of your life) 6×10^4/6×10^9 = 10^-5

Which gives: N ~ 4

This is part of the fun of being a xenobiologist or SETI member. You get to just take a wild guess at a number, and if you’re right to anywhere within a few orders of magnitude then you’re doing pretty good.

Of course, there are other problems, paralleled with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which revolves around the question of how to go about your search. For SETI, we primarily scan the skies for radio transmissions, but what if broadcast radio gets replaced by point-to-point (narrowbeam) communication in an extremely short amount of time (relatively speaking). It harkens back to the question of “why do girls seem to date total jerks far more often than should be possible statistically?” When we pull out the spectrum, we immediately see why: nice, shy guys are invisible. You’ll need special tactics and tools to find them.

Interestingly, as you get older, this equation changes, and not for the better, I should think. The smacktard quotient S probably increases as people mature a bit, or at least learn how to better hide their inner jerk (this latter part will be compensated for by a decrease in C, since you’ll still find out, it’ll just be later in the relationship). The C factor can change fairly dramatically in either direction, partly because as you get older you deal with problems better, and thus the range of people you can be compatabile with increases, but at the same time, you can have more bad memories that make you go “no, I like you and all, but that totally reminds me of something my ex used to do and I can’t deal with that.” Also, since you have less time left in your life, you may not be willing to commit to a promising relationship to see if it will in fact work out. Most dramatically, A will change from the influence of two factors. First, as you get older you will find your age bracket expands (a 19 year old likely won’t consider dating someone younger than 17 or older than 25 — an 8 year span — whereas a 30 year old might date someone from 22 to 38 — 8 years in either direction), and second, as you get older, the number of singles decreases. While the divorce rate is atrocious, there are still a significant number of people who get married and stay married.

Naturally, as we get older we also realize that things in life aren’t perfect, and that our long-held plans and/or dreams will simply have to change. Sometimes this just involves fairly minor compromises (found the right person and just wanted to wait until you were actually making more money than those on welfare to propose? Well, they won’t wait forever, so if that point in your life is still 5 years distant, you might need to jump-start the process a bit). However, some people are finding that they face darker decisions. I’m not saying I know anyone thinking of this, but some girls have given up on trying to find the right guy and settle down before having kids. Sperm is cheap, being a single mom isn’t so unusual anymore, so why not just get pregnant when you’re ready and fertile, and let the guy come whenever the fates decide? It does influence your odds of finding a guy, since now you also have to figure in the number who, despite liking kids, aren’t so keen on helping to raise some that aren’t their own, and you also have to deal with a drastic decrease in time available for romance. But it does completely bypass the issue of getting married (or merely pregnant) partially out of desperation, and then having to deal with joint custody and messy breakups.

And for the low, low cost of monthly bleed-outs, you too can have this kind of reproductive freedom!

Rabbits!

So one of my professors is talking openly of retiring in a few years, and about how I’m going to be one of his last students (yeesh, he’ll never retire if he waits for me to finish my doctorate!). Recently, he was looking at his pension plan, the money he put away for himself on his own, etc., and ran the math.

He says that if you go through school and get your PhD, then go into academia, get a pension and retire, you’d be worse off than if you simply dropped out and got a decent paying job, and put the money away. Even though by the time you were of retirement age you would have a pension and be making more (by his calculations) it just didn’t make up for that 6-10 year head start at such a huge lead. Of course, his calculation assumed that if you did go get a good job, you’d continue to live like a grad student “and no one would willingly live like that. Once you have the money, you’ll go out and spend it, you won’t save it for the long term.” He also didn’t mention that he left out how very lucky you’d have to be in the academic path to only spend a year or two in post-doc, and to pick up a decent paying, pensioned position in your 30’s.

This is all stuff I knew, but hadn’t been hit over the head with it from people who did make that choice.

My dad talked about some of that this weekend too. My sister’s having a little bit of trouble in school, so we’ve been talking about how important it is to stick with it, and how vital education is… and then after she was gone, we talked about how very little it’s worth, and how perverse it is that after your master’s degree, the longer you spend in school, the less valuable you become.

Reminds me of the great Simpsons episode when Bart was playing with the pony tail he cut off a grad student in the theatre.

Bart: “Hey, look at me, I’m a grad student. I’m 30 years old and made six-hundered dollars last year.
Marge: “Don’t make fun of grad students, they just made a terrible life choice.”

I’m not quite 30, but I’m close enough that I’m starting to question just what exactly it is I’ve gotten into. At the beginning, I’d hoped to breeze through and be done and ready to start one of those family things when I was 30. At the time I was stupid and arrogant, thinking that I was smart and hard working, and actually thought I could finish my degree a term early (that is, I started in January, a bit of an off-term, and hoped to finish at the same time as the people who started in September that year). Now I’m 26, I noticed in the mirror this morning that my grey hairs are no longer a small pocket of unrest on my brow with some scattered dissidents in the fringes, I’ve got riots and organizations forming on both sides of the globe. I feel old, and it’s strange how it sort of hits you like a sledgehammer at times. I’m only a day older than yesterday, but today all of a sudden, I feel it.

I’ve gone off talking about my hair, and I don’t mean to be too vain about it. I know that I am being a little vain about it, although I honestly don’t think other people can really tell. Aside from the one prominent group on my forehead, all the others seem to be behind other hairs, so they really only show when my hair is sitting a little funny. Plus, my normal hairs are a little shiny, so it’s hard to say for sure whether that’s white hair you’re seeing, or just a particular reflection sheening off a youthful black one. (And the less said about the very obvious problem with my aging hair, around back, the better).

I was so busy with my thesis when I turned 25 that I just never really had time to get into a good quarter-life-crisis funk. I don’t really have the time now, but I guess this sort of thing won’t wait forever.

My goals in life were never very lofty. Scratch that — I did have some lofty goals, but at the same time realized how improbable they were, and they lived side-by-side with more realistic ones. For example, I wanted to be an astronaut and a science fiction writer, but knew those were pretty much impossible. I did, however, think that even if I could never live off being a writer, I might have at least written a novella or two to print off and chuck at my friends for want of something less valuable to throw. And I figured I might have had a freelance article or short story published in a magazine, so I could at least be a serious hobbiest. I am fairly pleased with how the website has developed, especially since I went to the all-out blog format: it’s a lot easier to put up a ton of unreadable garbage when you don’t feel any compulsion to make it fit into any overriding heirarchy, or to have individual articles/rants stand on their own in any sort of timeless fashion. Getting people to call me doctor figured in there to some degree, but I reasoned I would be done by 29, or 30 at the latest (4 years left on that deadline: it’s been done before… but in this field?).

Anyway, enough of that for now, since there’s not much I can do about any of it except stare in the mirror and shake my head.