h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

... Or how many couples a day do it in particular area (town, country)? Have anyone ever seen that or similar data on the Net or somewhere else? I will be very grateful for any info or reference. Need it for a publication I'm currently wirking on.

Editorial Note: This conversation has been moved from 'Contributing to the Guide' to 'Ask the h2g2 Community'.

This should be solved by a bit of simple maths...

Using a simple Poisson distribution, we can estimate that, for a normally distributed population, about 27% are below 15, or above 65. If people outside these ages are having sex, I don't really want to know about, to be honest.

Roughly 15% of the population are single, according to Cosmo. So the number of people eligible to have sex is 85% of 73% of the population, or about 62%. The actual number of couples (we are sensibly excluding masturbation or orgies), is therefore 31% of the population.

According to FHM, the average couple have sex 5 times a week (don't complain). It's a well-known fact that the average sexual act averages 14 minutes, or 93 thrusts. Therefore the average sex time per week for each couple is 1 hour and 10 minutes.

For the sake of simple maths, we will assume that every couple could have sex at any time - this is obviously not true; nighttime is usually more popular. A week has 168 hours - therefore the probability that a couple is having sex right now is 0.0063

So, the estimated number of sexual acts going on as we speak is (population * .32 * 0.0063). The UK has a population of 59m by the last sentence, so there are an estimated 120,000 couples having sex right now. Wow!

B

Oopsie - in that last paragraph, for 'sentence', read 'census'

Damn phonetic spelling.

B

I didn't know you were into 15 year olds, Master B!

Master B, when you make love - do you carry a piece if graph paper or something?

Nah, I'm sure he said it was a slide rule

I read somewhere that estimates say 4000 people in the world are having sex at any one moment.

That does seem like an extraordinarily low number. A mere 0.000005% of the world's population, in fact.

I don't make up the rules!

Errmm, nothing personal boys... but this sounds like sex with a maths professor. Any chance of "well I quite can't remember" syndrome...