Have you ever met someone who could literally be your twin……except they’re not related to you or connected to you in any way? Scientists say that statistically every person has roughly six doppelgängers out there in the world. Folk wisdom has it that everyone has a doppelgänger — somewhere out there, there’s a perfect duplicate of you — but is there any truth to it? We live on a planet with seven billion people, so surely someone else is bound to have been born with a face that looks like ours, right? It’s more complicated than that. In 2015, researchers set out to test the risk of mistaking an innocent double for a killer. They painstakingly analyzed the faces of nearly 4,000 individuals, measuring the distance between key features such as the eyes and ears. Then, they calculated the possibility that the faces of two people would match. It turns out that even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, there’s only a 1 in 135 chance that there’s a single pair of doppelgängers. One group, Twin Strangers, has set out to prove this is the case and launched a project designed to help total strangers find someone who looks just like them – and so far, they seem to be proving that everyone has a least one twin and maybe more. Even if it’s proven that everyone has a twin, would you want to meet yours?
