冷答案|我们该执着于唯一的灵魂伴侣吗？

What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?

如果每个人实际上只有一个灵魂伴侣，存在于世界上某个地方，以一个随机的身份，那会怎样?

                  —Benjamin Staffin

What a nightmare that would be.

那将是一场多么可怕的噩梦。

There are a lot of problems with the concept of a single random soul mate. As Tim Minchin put it in his song If I Didn’t Have You:

唯一又随机的灵魂伴侣，这样的概念有很多问题。正如蒂姆·明钦(Tim Minchin)在他的歌曲《如果我没有你》(If I Didn’t Have You)中所说:

Your love is one in a million

You couldn’t buy it at any price.

你的爱是百万分之一

你无论如何也买不到它。

But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves,

Statistically,some of them would be equally nice.

但在另外九百九十万的其他爱中，

从统计学上讲，其中一些爱也同样不错。

But what if we did have one randomly-assigned perfect soul mate, and we couldn’t be happy with anyone else? Would we find each other?

但是如果我们确实有一个随机分配的完美的灵魂伴侣，而我们和除他/她之外的其他人在一起就是不能开心呢？我们能找到彼此吗？

We’ll assume your soul mate is set at birth. You know nothing about who or where theyare, but—as in the romantic cliché—you’ll recognize each other the moment your eyes meet.

我们假设你的灵魂伴侣是在出生时被设定的。你不知道他们是谁，在哪里，但是——就像浪漫的套路——你们一见面就能认出对方。

Right away, this raises a few questions. For starters, is your soul mate even stillalive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billionare alive now (which gives the human condition a 93% mortality rate). If we’reall paired up at random, 90% of our soul mates are long dead.

这会立刻引发一些问题。首先，你的灵魂伴侣还活着吗?大约有1000亿人曾经活过，但现在只有70亿人还活着(这使得人类的死亡率达到了93%)。如果我们都是随机配对的，90%的灵魂伴侣都早已死去。

an assortment of stick figure characters, dying in a range of dates, from 63,556 BCE to someone who is alive. 

各种各样的人，从公元前63556到现在还活着的人，会死于一系列的日期。

That sounds horrible. But wait, it gets worse: A simple argument shows we can’t just limit ourselves to past humans; we have to include an unknown number of future humans as well. See, if it’s possible for your soul mate to be in the distant past, then it also has to be possible for soul mates to be in the distant future. After all, your soul mate’s soul mate is.

这听起来可怕。但是等等，事情变得更糟了：一个简单的论点表明我们不能仅仅局限于过去的人类；我们还必须包括未知数量的未来人类。如果你的灵魂伴侣可能在遥远的过去，那么灵魂伴侣也必须可能在遥远的未来。毕竟，你灵魂伴侣的灵魂伴侣就是如此。

So let’s assume your soul mate lives at the same time as you. Furthermore, to keep things from getting creepy, we’ll assume they’re within a few years of your age. With the same-age restriction, most of us have a pool of around half a billion potential matches.

假设你的灵魂伴侣和你生活在同一时间。此外，为了不让事情变得诡异，我们假设他们与你的年龄相差几岁。在相同年龄的限制下，我们大多数人都有大约5亿潜在的匹配对象。

But what about gender and sexual orientation? And culture? And language? We could keep using demographics to try to break things down further, but we’d be drifting away from the idea of a random soul mate. In our scenario, you don’tknow anything about who your soul mate will be until you look into their eyes. Everybody has only one orientation—toward their soul mate.

但是性别和性取向呢？文化呢？语言呢？我们可以继续利用人口统计数据来进一步分析问题，但我们会逐渐远离随机的灵魂伴侣的想法。在我们的场景中，你不知道谁是你的灵魂伴侣，直到你看着他们的眼睛。每个人只有一个方向——朝向他们的灵魂伴侣。

The odds of running into your soul mate are incredibly small. The number of strangers we make eye contact with each day is hard to estimate. It can vary from almost none (shut-ins or people in small towns) to many thousands (a police officer in Times Square). Let’s suppose you lock eyes with an average of a few dozen new strangers each day. (I’m pretty introverted, so for me that’s definitely a generous estimate.) If 10% of them are close to your age, that’s around 50,000people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you’ll only find true love in one life time out of ten thousand.

遇到你的灵魂伴侣的几率非常小。我们每天与陌生人进行眼神交流的数量难以估计。从几乎没有(自闭者或小镇上的人)到成千上万(时代广场上的一名警官)，情况都不一样。假设你每天都要和几十个陌生人对视。（我很内向，所以对我来说，这绝对是一个慷慨的估计。）如果其中10%的人与你的年龄相近，那么一生中大约有5万人。考虑到你有5亿潜在的灵魂伴侣，这意味着你在一生中找到真正的爱情的概率只有万分之一。

a block of 10,000 blocks, showing one out of 10,000 finding their soul mate andthe remaining being 'alone forever'

一个有10000个格子的表格，显示每10000个格子中只有一个找到了他们的灵魂伴侣，剩下的是“永远孤独”

But with the threat of dying alone looming so imminently, society could restructure to try to enable as much eye contact as possible. We could put together massive conveyer belts to move lines of people past each other …

但随着独自死亡的威胁迫在眉睫，社会可能会进行重组，尽可能多地进行眼神交流。我们可以把巨大的传送带连在一起，让人们彼此路过……

several stick figure characters on two conveyer belts going opposite directions, passingeach other.

两条传送带上的几个人，向相反的方向传送，与彼此相遇。

...but if the eye contact effect works over webcams, we could just use a modifiedversion of ChatRoulette.

…但如果目光接触效果能通过网络摄像头实现，我们就可以使用改良版的ChatRoulette（可与陌生人交流的在线视频聊天室）。

two stick figure characters, one on a computer and one standing behind them. the standing behind them says '...yup, another butt.' and the one on the computer says 'but it could be my soul mate's butt!'

两个小人，一个在电脑前，一个站在他们身后。站在他们身后的人说‘……是的,另一个屁股。电脑前的那个人说，“但那可能是我灵魂伴侣的屁股!”

If everyone used the system for eight hours a day, seven days a week, and if it takes you a couple seconds to decide if someone’s your soul mate, this system could—in theory—match everyone up with their soul mates in a few decades. (I modeled a few simple systems to estimate how quickly people would pair off and drop out of the singles pool. If you want to try to work through the math for a particular setup, you might start by looking at derangement problems.)

如果每个人每天使用这个系统8小时，一周7天，如果你花几秒钟来决定某人是否是你的灵魂伴侣，这个系统理论上可以在几十年内将每个人与他们的灵魂伴侣匹配起来。(我对一些简单的系统进行了建模，以估计人们会以多快的速度结对并退出单身泳池。如果你想通过数学计算来解决一个特定的设定，你可以先从疯狂的问题开始。)

In the real world, many people have trouble finding any time at all for romance—few could devote two decades to it. So maybe only rich kids would be able to afford to sit around on SoulMateRoulette. Unfortunately for the proverbial 1%, most of their soul mates are to be found in the other 99%. If only 1% of people use the service, then 1% of that 1% would find their match through this system—one in ten thousand.

在现实世界中，很多人根本就找不到时间谈恋爱——几乎没有人能在这上面花上20年时间。也许只有富裕的孩子能够在灵魂伴侣聊天室（SoulMateRoulette）里一直挂着。不幸的是，对于众所周知的1%的人来说，他们大多数的灵魂伴侣都是在其他99%的人身上找到的。如果只有1%的人使用这个服务，那么这1%的人里只有1%会通过这个系统找到他们的匹配——概率是万分之一。

The other 99% of the 1% (“We are the zero point nine nine percent!”) would have an incentive to get more people into the system. They might sponsor projects akin to One Laptop Per Child (but with a sleazier vibe). Careers like “cashier” and“police officer in Times Square” would become high-status prizes because of the eye contact potential. People would flock to cities and public gathering places to find love—just as they do now.

1%里剩下的那99%（“我们的成功率有0.99%!”）将有动力让更多的人进入这个系统。他们可能会赞助类似于每个孩子一台笔记本电脑这样的项目(但带有一种比较低俗的氛围)。像“收银员”和“时代广场警察”这样的职业，由于眼睛接触的可能性大而获得追捧。大家涌向人群聚集的城市和公共场所去寻找爱情——正如他们现在做的一样。

But even if a bunch of us spent years on SoulMateRoulette, another bunch of us managed to hold jobs that offered constant eye contact with strangers, and the rest of us just hoped for luck, only a small minority of us would ever find true love. The rest of us would be out of luck.

但是，即使我们中的一群人在“灵魂伴侣聊天室”上花了数年时间，另一群人成功地找到了一份能与陌生人保持经常目光接触的工作，而其余的人只是寄希望于运气，我们中也只有一小部分人能找到真爱。其余的人就没那么幸运了。

Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They’d want to join the club, so they’d get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They’d marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family. (Of course, this never happens in our world.)

考虑到所有的压力，有些人会假装找到了。他们想加入这个俱乐部，所以他们会和另一个孤独的人在一起，上演一场虚假的灵魂伴侣相遇。他们会结婚，隐藏他们的关系问题，努力向朋友和家人展现快乐的一面。（当然，这在我们的世界里从未发生过。）

All in all, the world of random soul mates is an even lonelier one than ours. I prefer Tim Minchin’s take on things:

总之，随机灵魂伴侣的世界比我们的世界更孤独。我更喜欢蒂姆·明钦(Tim Minchin)的观点:

With all my heart and all my mind I know one thing is true:

I have just one life and just one love and, my love, that love is you.

我坚信有一件事是真的:

我只有一次生命，只有一次爱，而我的爱，就是你。

And if it wasn't for you, baby,

I really think that I would

have somebody else.

不过如果没有你，宝贝，

我真的认为我也会

有别人。

内容译自what-if.xkcd.com

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