Two friends of mine, contemporary friends, recently reached 70 years of age. Seventy seems a real milestone. My mean, my friends, not my parents friends, are 70. That’s kinda scary. Now, my aunt and my mother-in-law are both 98 (that’s impressive too, huh!).

So, I was wondering what were the odds of reaching those milestones?

I found a very, cool web site with extremely, clever animated graphs that provided a few insights (http://plus.maths.org/content/understanding-uncertainty-how-long-will-you-live).

It says that 75% of people currently living will reach 70. Not bad odds. But curious to think that maybe 25% of my high school graduating class will be dead when I reach 70.

How about reaching 98? The chart says that 2% of newborns survive to be 98 years old. Now that’s impressive if you are one of the few.

Life is like one of those adventure movies, you know, where a bunch of people go down a river in a boat and by the end only a few are left alive. We are on a quest and losing companions as we go.