This is neat, but I don't think it's actually drawing the year from the correct probability distribution - "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct, but in 5 "random" choices, only one was from anywhere near modern day.
I did a statistical analysis and you are correct. The issue seems to be that crude birth rates from around 500CE and earlier are overestimated significantly. The bad source seems to be Kaneda & Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?", where they assume a flat crude birth rate of 80 for all BCE dates. The probability distribution is just a function of pop and CBR, so it results in significantly decreasing modern birth probabilities.
The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.
I guess you are right, but it makes it more interesting if the picks are not almost all from the recent past. On the other hand, I would also guess that spreading the picks evenly across the time range might result in many being from times with little data to differentiate them.
How near is near? With ~100 billion people having ever lived, the odds of a randomly selected life falling within the past couple of centuries are not all that high.
Before clicking, I said to myself "Indian peasant".
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Ganges Plain in 1628 CE.
> She was born, married at 16, lost her mother at 19, was orphaned at 30, had 8 children, and died at 39 of pneumonic plague, with 6 surviving children.
Nailed it. Though in retrospect, I drew really well. It would have been safer to guess "toddler death".
"You have died of Dysentery [on the Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE at 2 months old]"
I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...
We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed. No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.
I loved it and feel inspired from it.
(It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugged to death)
> No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.
I don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours typing at a keyboard to create this, but for things like this, a labor of love, that's typically not the "expensive" part.
I believe that part serves to emphasize the main point.
To elucidate for this particular example, before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.
Now that the barrier is much lower, the creator didn't mind spinning up and providing it with no monetization (e.g. no ads).
> before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.
I do wonder if that life expectancy is dragged significantly down by all the ways you can die early on in life, so that it's not so much that 28 years is an old age for the time as it is a function of all things that prevent you from getting to old age.
And so if you went to a town square or market in that time (if it's a time that had such a thing), perhaps it might still be perfectly normal to see people in their 30s, 40s, 50s.
The life expectancy of a person who lives to 18 increases dramatically across the board.
You even see this today. If you live to 70, you can expect to live 14 to 17 more years. So to about 84 on the short side and 87 on the long side.
However, make it to 75, your life expectancy is 11 to 14 years. Which is 86 on the short side and 89 on the long side.
Basically, the longer you live, the longer you should live, but eventually the range collapses. And that's because people come in under the average all the time. Some people die at 71. And those people stop getting counted when determining life expectancy at 75.
Right, that 42% dying before age 5 means the survivors typically lived well beyond 28. There weren’t a huge number of people living into their 80s, but 28 wouldn’t have been “old man” territory.
I think the model has an unusual preference for the Korean Peninsula before Christ. A number of commenters, including myself, draw from this area and period.
That is surprisingly similar given how few people seem to have commented so far. Makes me wonder if some part of this is starting from a constant seed or something...
I am really happy to live in the modern age. It is quite amazing to think that people are facing cardiovascular disease and cancer instead of random parasites nowadays. Modern medicine is such a miracle.
How many random parasites has modern medicine removed from you? Likely you never even had one. It's not just medicine, we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing
Now this is fun vibe coding. A fascinating way of reckoning with our cosmic luck. On "only the first roll counts" rules, I rolled a girl who died at 8 months from a respiratory infection in the Indus valley, in 7785 BCE (9,810 years ago).
I rolled again, of course, but at that point it feels like fishing for a best case scenario. But I at least got someone from the North China Plain in 75 BCE who lived to 74 and had 6 grand children. Married at 19 and stayed married to age 71. Hard to hope for better than that, against these odds at least.
Edit: Obviously progress isn't inevitable, and at any point in time you can be unlucky. But it does seem like, for most points in history, you would rather be you, in your version of the present, than a randomly rolled person from any prior point of history leading up to your moment.
So most of the time, anyone playing this would feel more lucky to be themselves than any of the options they would have to roll for. Maybe if a version of this was offered to people 10,000 years from now they would say "crap, I rolled 2026".
I was so lucky! One lived to 35 in the Paris basin a few thousand years ago, the other lived to 25 in China, died in 1945. Both were married and left living children!
I was wondering if the generated people “fill up a spot” and temporarily change the stats for generating new lives. Eg, if the app already generated 10M stories, is it still using the same initial distribution for the new ones, or is generation conditioned on the stats of the already generated?
I think graph being log makes it a little hard to understand that the median birth year was around 2000 years ago. On the graph that is in the flat part but the flat part was a really, really long time.
After having my first child (a girl who is now nearly 3 years old) these stats impact me so much more. My first roll was a girl in the Iraniam plateau in the 18 century who had a 33% chance of dying before they reached 5. She managed to live to 70 but experience so much death in her life.
I can't imagine my daughter dying before she reaches 5, it feels like it would be the worst feeling I could possibly imagine and then some.
Visit any older cemetery and look for the tiny headstones and the matching very brief lifespans, or read an older obituary for someone from your great-grandparent's generation or further back, or watch a couple of seasons of _Call the Midwife_.
"A girl was born in 1276 BCE, on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad... She lived on a labourer's wage"
Wage labor didn't exist yet and the cited source is for labor history between 1500CE and the present.
The AI illustration also doesn't make any sense for the period.
This is the genuinely bad kind of slop because it's pretending to be semi-factual.
I wrote a short story based on a similar scenario. (Caveat, I did it with AI help, but my ideas and many iterations and me doing final editing to get it the way I want).
Without wishing to be unkind, this reads a lot more as 'one-shot with AI' than 'many iterations'; if you truly did that much editing, you didn't put it where it showed.
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
Yeah, I think the AI probably shows. But in fact it is the result of many iterations.
But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.
But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.
Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.
an effective way to glean a little slice of understanding of the human experience throughout the ages, though 'every human never' might be more apt a name as its all statistics from the demographics to the generative portrait
Yes, but I definitely think the probabilities are off - the explanation, which I agree with, states "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present."
But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.
Bear in mind that the population curve defaults to a log scale on the year axis. If you switch it over to linear, that big fat area at the end shrinks to a needle-like spike..
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Levant in 1042 CE.
> She was born, married at 18, had 4 children, lost her mother at 28, was orphaned at 41, was widowed at 70, and died at 71 of heart failure (degenerative illness), with 3 surviving children and 9 grandchildren.
First try. Honestly I'm going to call this a W under the circumstances.
This is neat, but I don't think it's actually drawing the year from the correct probability distribution - "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct, but in 5 "random" choices, only one was from anywhere near modern day.
I did a statistical analysis and you are correct. The issue seems to be that crude birth rates from around 500CE and earlier are overestimated significantly. The bad source seems to be Kaneda & Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?", where they assume a flat crude birth rate of 80 for all BCE dates. The probability distribution is just a function of pop and CBR, so it results in significantly decreasing modern birth probabilities.
The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.
I guess you are right, but it makes it more interesting if the picks are not almost all from the recent past. On the other hand, I would also guess that spreading the picks evenly across the time range might result in many being from times with little data to differentiate them.
How near is near? With ~100 billion people having ever lived, the odds of a randomly selected life falling within the past couple of centuries are not all that high.
Okay step away from the waving hands and read the source material.
This could be pretty great for a play through of Thousand Year Old Vampire, a pretty terrific journaling game: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/
And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world.
This can be great - Tom from the Yogscast has run a few of these, and they can get pretty wild. It's a simple premise but works well.
Before clicking, I said to myself "Indian peasant".
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Ganges Plain in 1628 CE.
> She was born, married at 16, lost her mother at 19, was orphaned at 30, had 8 children, and died at 39 of pneumonic plague, with 6 surviving children.
Nailed it. Though in retrospect, I drew really well. It would have been safer to guess "toddler death".
"You have died of Dysentery [on the Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE at 2 months old]"
I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...
All babies were exclusively breastfed in 3064 BCE.
Strangely, I too, died in the Korean Peninsula at 8 months old, but circa 6000 BCE.
Hmm, I was at the Korean Penisula too. How representatively random is this thing?
I died of malaria at age 1 in the West African Sahel!
I died at 1 in Mesopotamia in 3966 BCE of dysentery.
We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed. No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.
I loved it and feel inspired from it.
(It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugged to death)
> No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.
I don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours typing at a keyboard to create this, but for things like this, a labor of love, that's typically not the "expensive" part.
In fact, there was a time when the internet was mostly interesting side projects, if you go back far enough (the mid 1990s, say).
It’s true. It feels like that age may be revisiting us. Makes me happy to see stuff like this which isn’t upselling something.
> There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
This is a strawman.
The original point was "the economics ... have changed"
I read this as, it's much easier to spin up a project of this scale even non-monetized, and more people are able and willing to do so.
Yes, it's easier - but I'm not sure what that has to do with ads or asking for things beyond attention.
I believe that part serves to emphasize the main point.
To elucidate for this particular example, before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.
Now that the barrier is much lower, the creator didn't mind spinning up and providing it with no monetization (e.g. no ads).
> before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.
Yes, this was exactly what I meant in OP.
>You have drawn a boy, born in the Korean Peninsula in 3394 BCE
>Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs
>Died before age 5: 42%
>Died before age 15: 50%
i knew life expectancy was obviously lower, but those stats were a bit eye opening.
unfortunately, died at 3 from an accident.
I do wonder if that life expectancy is dragged significantly down by all the ways you can die early on in life, so that it's not so much that 28 years is an old age for the time as it is a function of all things that prevent you from getting to old age.
And so if you went to a town square or market in that time (if it's a time that had such a thing), perhaps it might still be perfectly normal to see people in their 30s, 40s, 50s.
That's exactly the case. Overall average life expenctancy as adult didn't change much from older times - about 15 years more.
That's exactly what happens.
The life expectancy of a person who lives to 18 increases dramatically across the board.
You even see this today. If you live to 70, you can expect to live 14 to 17 more years. So to about 84 on the short side and 87 on the long side.
However, make it to 75, your life expectancy is 11 to 14 years. Which is 86 on the short side and 89 on the long side.
Basically, the longer you live, the longer you should live, but eventually the range collapses. And that's because people come in under the average all the time. Some people die at 71. And those people stop getting counted when determining life expectancy at 75.
Right, that 42% dying before age 5 means the survivors typically lived well beyond 28. There weren’t a huge number of people living into their 80s, but 28 wouldn’t have been “old man” territory.
I think the model has an unusual preference for the Korean Peninsula before Christ. A number of commenters, including myself, draw from this area and period.
My first run got Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE...
That is surprisingly similar given how few people seem to have commented so far. Makes me wonder if some part of this is starting from a constant seed or something...
"Any Korean Ever"
I am really happy to live in the modern age. It is quite amazing to think that people are facing cardiovascular disease and cancer instead of random parasites nowadays. Modern medicine is such a miracle.
How many random parasites has modern medicine removed from you? Likely you never even had one. It's not just medicine, we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing
>we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing
for now
> instead of random parasites nowadays
Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.
Now this is fun vibe coding. A fascinating way of reckoning with our cosmic luck. On "only the first roll counts" rules, I rolled a girl who died at 8 months from a respiratory infection in the Indus valley, in 7785 BCE (9,810 years ago).
I rolled again, of course, but at that point it feels like fishing for a best case scenario. But I at least got someone from the North China Plain in 75 BCE who lived to 74 and had 6 grand children. Married at 19 and stayed married to age 71. Hard to hope for better than that, against these odds at least.
Edit: Obviously progress isn't inevitable, and at any point in time you can be unlucky. But it does seem like, for most points in history, you would rather be you, in your version of the present, than a randomly rolled person from any prior point of history leading up to your moment.
So most of the time, anyone playing this would feel more lucky to be themselves than any of the options they would have to roll for. Maybe if a version of this was offered to people 10,000 years from now they would say "crap, I rolled 2026".
Edit 2: I think the death hug might have got it.
on my 6th only the first roll counts roll, i got a boy born near Nairobi in 36,112 BCE that lived to 70
probably like 5% of humanity has his genes now. that was fun vibe coding
I died within 2 days on my first roll. made it to 8 months on my second
I was so lucky! One lived to 35 in the Paris basin a few thousand years ago, the other lived to 25 in China, died in 1945. Both were married and left living children!
It seems like the server might be overwhelmed
Very cool project
I was wondering if the generated people “fill up a spot” and temporarily change the stats for generating new lives. Eg, if the app already generated 10M stories, is it still using the same initial distribution for the new ones, or is generation conditioned on the stats of the already generated?
The random life I got: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
Hug of death I think.
Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.
Works but it's slow to load up.
Really puts the marvels of modern life into perspective, most people did not live long or happy lives for much of human history.
I think graph being log makes it a little hard to understand that the median birth year was around 2000 years ago. On the graph that is in the flat part but the flat part was a really, really long time.
After having my first child (a girl who is now nearly 3 years old) these stats impact me so much more. My first roll was a girl in the Iraniam plateau in the 18 century who had a 33% chance of dying before they reached 5. She managed to live to 70 but experience so much death in her life.
I can't imagine my daughter dying before she reaches 5, it feels like it would be the worst feeling I could possibly imagine and then some.
Visit any older cemetery and look for the tiny headstones and the matching very brief lifespans, or read an older obituary for someone from your great-grandparent's generation or further back, or watch a couple of seasons of _Call the Midwife_.
"A girl was born in 1276 BCE, on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad... She lived on a labourer's wage"
Wage labor didn't exist yet and the cited source is for labor history between 1500CE and the present. The AI illustration also doesn't make any sense for the period.
This is the genuinely bad kind of slop because it's pretending to be semi-factual.
Oh nice! If you liked it, you might like:
yourlifeunderrome.com
Spot checked a life from 1990s in the Iberian peninsula and it cites the population at 72 million people. Off by quite a bit. Pretty cool regardless!
This is awesome. I love seeing how humans have evolved into what we are today.
I wrote a short story based on a similar scenario. (Caveat, I did it with AI help, but my ideas and many iterations and me doing final editing to get it the way I want).
https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...
Without wishing to be unkind, this reads a lot more as 'one-shot with AI' than 'many iterations'; if you truly did that much editing, you didn't put it where it showed.
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
Yeah, I think the AI probably shows. But in fact it is the result of many iterations.
But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.
But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.
Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.
an effective way to glean a little slice of understanding of the human experience throughout the ages, though 'every human never' might be more apt a name as its all statistics from the demographics to the generative portrait
Leading cause of death: dysentry
Had to laugh.
boy, born in the Guinea Coast in 211,966 BCE. Died from an accident at age 40.
Has anyone managed to roll a life later than ~600CE?
Yes, but I definitely think the probabilities are off - the explanation, which I agree with, states "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present."
But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.
Bear in mind that the population curve defaults to a log scale on the year axis. If you switch it over to linear, that big fat area at the end shrinks to a needle-like spike..
1956 CE: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1409269740-1599827252-31263759...
I got 1951: https://anyhumanever.com/life/982671145-1647234921-653406957...
1816 CE: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
1980CE, Nile Valley, died at 68 from cardiovascular disease.
You can chose.
we are probably living inside a more advanced version of this game right now.
Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.
Very cool. Reads like a Dwarf Fortress history. For those that don't play, every creature in the game has a life story.
I died at age 2 of Typhoid Fever.
Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Levant in 1042 CE.
> She was born, married at 18, had 4 children, lost her mother at 28, was orphaned at 41, was widowed at 70, and died at 71 of heart failure (degenerative illness), with 3 surviving children and 9 grandchildren.
First try. Honestly I'm going to call this a W under the circumstances.