Luck: Sophocles among the Dinosaurs

Statistics distinguishes three sorts of luck,

circumstantial, resultant, and constitutive:

(a) being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, (b) the outcome, and (c) fortunate or unfortunate context, such as, e.g., the asteroid that killed the flightless dinosaurs sixty-six odd million years ago.

Philosophy's hair-splitting distracts!

What was the luck we really had?

Why me, why you? Well, good or bad?

What did we do? And was it fun?

Perhaps luck is feeling, feeling facts,

and not a haphazard chance outcome?

I’d be content (imagining Sophocles

and the big dinosaurs'd both survived)

to be a thoughtful little thunder lizard

or perhaps a blue jay in an apple tree—

a perch convenient to the birdie's gizzard!

Luck's but “chance, taken personally."

it's said, and taken thus, as far as

can today be told, looks after me.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/07/the-big-idea-should-we-be-thinking-about-luck-differently. The writer, Sir David Spiegelhalter, is emeritus professor of statistics at Cambridge and the author of The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck (London: Pelican Books, 2024).

"Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best," the Chorus declares in Sophocles' play Oedipus at Colonus.

Roots

“All this has been driven largely by the sinking of roots.”—Thomas Halliday, Otherlands

A rhizosphere, or “world of roots,”*

underlies lives that rising raise

their arms toward a star that shoots

or rains down rays on which to graze.

The thralls of replicating life

so stuff themselves with solar meat,

and learn to thrust in mutual strife,

until, grown old in self-defeat,

their flesh is food that others eat,

and fuel a growing human swarm

will burn in winter to keep warm.

Those also have a rhizosphere,

although it’s what they have to fear,

with roots that murder growing near.

*Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (New York: Random House, 2023), on the Carboniferous era, 309 million years ago, p. 189.

No, no, Nunette!

Nun raises the sun out of Huh, primordial chaos, creating the world

Chorus: No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, Nanette.—No, No, Nanette (1924)

The Greeks say Night, Nyx,

first brought forth Eros (sex).

Egypt, however, attributes the task

of awakening Huh's todger

to Nun, whose front-office better half,

Nunette, deals with the wada-wada.

But presently, it seems, some asteroid

afire or other will crash

on whatever's left by then to smash,

Huh sitting sous vide, the cosmic catch,

and many a such bootless planetoid

murmurating in the outer void.

We'll have to start from scratch

again. Nunette gets so annoyed!

Note: "Nun can be seen as the first of all the gods and the creator of reality and personification of the cosmos. . . . Nun's consort (or his female aspect) was the goddess Nunut or Naunet."—https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu_(mythology)