This morning I was singing the Neutral Milk Hotel song In the Aeroplane Over the Sea which has a lyric "How strange it is to be anything at all..." This somehow got me thinking about the statistics about how likely it is to be born into a 1st world country since the advent of electricity and to be above the poverty line etc... I forget the odds but lets say its something like 1 in a billion. This is supposed to mean that each of us is very lucky, as the odds are a lot smaller than the odds of winning the lottery. However, because we cannot take the future of humanity into account, we have no idea what the complete set is. After all, it may turn out that 100 years from now, humanity explores space in peace and prosperity for a million years. Unlikely maybe, but illustrative. In such a circumstance, the odds of growing up in "good times" would rise considerably, and a new calculus might make us part of the unlucky group. On the other hand, if you facotr in the fact thaty we were born as people, and not, say, livestock and we start to look pretty lucky again. While me and most of my readers are lucky as compared to our contemporaries on the planet, it's not possible to say that we are lucky or unlucky per se. Regardless, the real magic is that we are anything at all.