From here
:
What she found was good news for the criminal justice system, but likely to disappoint anyone pining for their long-lost double: the chances of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion. Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that’s only a one in 135 chance that there’s a single pair of doppelgangers. “Before you could always be questioned in a court of law, saying ‘well what if someone else just looks like him?’ Now we can say it’s extremely unlikely,” says Teghan.
But that's about exactly 100% similar doppelgangers. The article also covers cases with similarity in general appearance, as you described:
Meanwhile more than one in ten people have round faces, according to research funded by a cosmetics company. Then there’s his nose. A study of photographs taken in Europe and Israel identified the ‘fleshy’ type as the most prevalent (24.2%). In the author’s view these are also the least attractive.
Finally – how much hair is there out there? If you thought this was too frivolous for serious investigation, you’d be wrong: among 24,300 people surveyed at a Florida theme park, 82% of men had hair shorter than shoulder-length. Natural blondes, however, constitute just 2%. As the ‘beard capital’ of the world, in the UK most men have some form of facial hair and nearly one in six have a full beard.
A simple calculation (male x brown eyes x blonde x round face x fleshy nose x short hair x full beard) reveals the probability of a person possessing all these features is just over one in 100,000 (0.00001020%).
That would give our guy no less than 74,000 potential doppelgangers. Of course many of these prevalence rates aren’t global, so this is very imprecise.
The rarer his "look" is in general population and the closer you want the similarity to be, the lower the chances of him finding his lookalike. Ridiculously Average Guy, on the other hand, will have more opportunities to find himself a body double. Also, it will be difficult to make a person with unusual features disappear without a trace even in a crowded city. There's also this bit:
Hope this helps.
Edited by Millership on Mar 1st 2019 at 8:53:16 PM
Spiral out, keep going.
The Master Of Fright & A Demon Of Light
If he doesn't need anybody with the excat same face, it's possible for him to find a body with same eye color and hair color (If it's not red or something), and the same build. But not identical, unless he has a twin.
~ * Bleh * ~ (Looking for a russian-speaker to consult about names and words for a thing)
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
Yes, it'd be a lot easier to find someone who looks like him but not exactly, and possibly shares other traits with him. Like how, surprisingly, it only takes 367 out of 8 billion people to get a 100% chance of at least one shared birthday.
Edited by Lymantria on May 10th 2019 at 6:07:47 AM
Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
The villain of my story wants to transfer their consciousness to another, healthier body. They specifically choose to use the body of someone who has their general appearance (same hair color, same eye color, similar build). Is this too much of a coincidence? Note, due to their circumstances, the villain couldn't go out and look for someone with a similar appearance. They basically waited until they ran into someone with a similar appearance and took over their body.