I'm not talking about souls or anything like that. I'm simply talking about the simple improbability of, out of all possible lives I could have had, mine being one this relatively comfortable and novel. How many organisms lived on Earth in the last 4 billion years? Some foo-illion, where foo is some prefix that I cannot even conceptualise, some number so large that it is far beyond my brain's ability to comprehend. It's difficult to accept that I, or any human, won such an incomprehensible lottery.

Particularly combined with our setting. We've just developed world-destroying weapons, and resources are running out - the environment is being destroyed, water reserves are being depleted, our society is built on non-renewable resources that will run out in the next couple of hundred years at the latest, all things which could lead to the use of such weapons. Plus we live in a novel time, with unbelievable speed of new discoveries and interesting things happening, in contrast to the billions of years of nothing much interesting happening. If you were going to create a simulation, isn't an interesting simulation like this exactly what you'd create, whether for entertainment or research?

And if it is a simulation, the odds of living such an interesting existence go up. Potentially by a Fooillion-fold multiplier. How many simulations have we run here in our short time having computing technology? Now imagine how many simulations higher beings could run, over a longer timescale. Our odds of existing in one of those interesting simulations is so much higher than this being an un-simulated universe where we just happened to be born in an immensely interesting time where the fate of civilization itself is at stake and could foreseeably end in 50 or 500 years.