'What If' There Were An Entire Book Devoted To Absurd Hypotheticals?

"Let's suppose you lock eyes with an average of a few dozen new strangers each day. ... If 10 percent of them are close to your age, that's around 50,000 people in a lifetime," Munroe writes. "Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you'll only find true love in one lifetime out of 10,000."

  Simple questions can lead to very complicated answers. For instance: What if everyone actually had just one soul mate — one random person somewhere in the world? Could they ever meet? "You know, there are a lot more people who have been alive than who are alive right now. So if your soul mate is randomly assigned from all humans, it's probably somebody who is already dead or who has not yet been born."
 That's Randall Munroe talking to NPR's Lynn Neary.