Free Launch Pad by Jody Lynn Nye, Mike Brotherton

known and probably not the values given in the problem, but we’ve made real progress. They’d only started finding exoplanets a few years before I was born, and now we have a pretty good idea of how many stars host Earth-like planets in their habitable zone.”
    The vacant way he looked back at her made her suspect that he still wasn’t getting it even though he’d eventually worked through the math in the homework example. She could just give him a metaphorical pat on the head and let him go, but what was the point of doing something if you weren’t going to do it well? Teaching evaluations counted for tenure, too. So how was she going to get through to him? What had Rodger suggested at the science education workshop? Being less abstract and more concrete?
    Then Bev considered another approach to the Drake equation that might make it more relatable.
    “Do you like to go out on dates?”
    He jumped a little in his seat and his face contorted in horror. “What do you mean?”
    The poor boy! She hadn’t transitioned well at all. In retrospect, her question did sound bad. Well, she was in for a gram, and might as well go in for a kilo. She sat back in her chair so as to look less threatening.
    “I’m just trying to make an analogy to a situation you’re more familiar with. Okay?”
    He visibly relaxed. “Okay.”
    “Imagine you go to a big campus party and want to meet someone there to date. How do you think you might be able to figure out how many dateable people might be there for you to meet?”
    “I could just go there and see, I guess.”
    Pulling teeth … She took a deep breath and decided to get him started.
    “Sure, but how about we approach it with a little math?” She could simplify the problem and see if a few leading questions would get him to start thinking critically. The party was like the galaxy, and people at the party were like stars, and while she could begin with equating the rates of star formation and of people arriving, along with stellar lifetime as the equivalent of how long people remained, she cut to the chase. “How many people are at a big campus party?”
    He looked at the ceiling for a moment then answered. “A few hundred. A big one, probably four hundred. Something like that.”
    Good. He already sounded more confident.
    “And would you say that you’d be able to make four hundred dates if you talked with everyone there?”
    “No,” he said, chuckling about it while he considered that. “Not at all.”
    She decided to skip a couple of factors that might be too personal, imagining Rodger teasing her about it later, or worse—the Dean not teasing her—and skipped ahead again. The important thing was the concept. “You’re a discerning guy with high standards, I’m sure. Maybe there’s only ten percent of the people there you might want to date?”
    He laughed a little. “Yeah.”
    “And ten percent of four hundred is…?”
    “Forty.”
    “And do you think some of those forty might already be in relationships and not open to dating?”
    “Yeah, say half. No, a quarter. A lot of couples on this campus.”
    Were there? She’d been too busy to notice. “Okay. And because you’re a friendly, charismatic person, how about we say the fraction that you talk with that would go out with you is one hundred percent?”
    He laughed again, but nodded.
    This was going fine. He was leaning back in his chair, resting his hand on a cardboard box, and engaged in a way he hadn’t been when it was all about stars and alien civilizations.
    “So let’s multiply that all out,” Bev said. “The number of potential dates at the party is equal to…?”
    “The number of people at the party, four hundred, times the fraction I’d like, times the fraction that are single, times the fraction that would like me—a hundred percent on that last one. I get ten. But I’d stop after one. All you need is one good one.”
    His comment struck her as more profound than he probably intended.