How it works

Each life is simulated in your browser, one year at a time. Nothing is generated by AI while you play, and the same link always gives the same five people.

Where you are born

The random draw is weighted by real births. From 1800 we use each country’s population and birth rate by decade; before 1800 we use the estimated population of about forty historical regions by century and a birth rate of 50 per 1,000. Roughly six in ten people born since 1 CE were born before 1800, and most of them in China or India, so that is where most draws land.

The map uses today’s borders. Numbers are national, not city by city: picking a city would only change the names. Papers and text use the name of the country or state at the time.

How long you live

Every year each person faces a chance of dying from a life table for that place and year. We build the table from life expectancy at birth and child mortality (Gapminder) with the Brass logit model, then adjust it by income fifth (the gap grows with inequality, from the Gini index), sex, town or country, and any war, famine or epidemic going on. Before 1800 the table comes from regional life-expectancy estimates.

How sure each number is

• Statistic: recorded data (most country data from 1950).
• Estimate: estimated or interpolated in the source data set (most country data before 1950).
• Model: our own calculation: everything before 1800, literacy and urbanisation before national statistics, and how hard each event hits each person.
• Forecast: UN medium-variant projections after 2025.

Events

216 wars, famines, epidemics, depressions, migrations and other events, each with dates, places, a death toll where one is known and a source. Death tolls are given plainly; there are no images of violence. Places and years without a listed event still play, they just have no event band yet.

Papers

Documents are drawn from templates for the place and time, with headings in the local language and handwriting fonts. They are illustrative, not copies of real records. People who could not write sign with a cross; enslaved people may appear only as a line in someone else’s inventory; and many lives leave no record at all.

Sources

• Gapminder (CC BY 4.0): life expectancy, child mortality, fertility, population, GDP per person, Gini.
• World Bank WDI via Gapminder (CC BY 4.0): urbanisation, birth rate, literacy.
• Natural Earth (public domain): the map.
• Brass (1971) general standard life table; long-run population estimates for historical regions (modelled).
• Event facts from Wikipedia and the sources linked on each event page.
• Fonts from Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License.