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.

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.

we are probably living inside a more advanced version of this game right now.

Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.

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

>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 died at age 2 of Typhoid Fever.

Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it

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.

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...

Leading cause of death: dysentry

Had to laugh.

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)

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.

Has anyone managed to roll a life later than ~600CE?

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!

Very cool. Reads like a Dwarf Fortress history. For those that don't play, every creature in the game has a life story.

Hug of death I think.

Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.

"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...

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...

Really puts the marvels of modern life into perspective, most people did not live long or happy lives for much of human history.

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.

Oh nice! If you liked it, you might like:

yourlifeunderrome.com

> 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 awesome. I love seeing how humans have evolved into what we are today.

boy, born in the Guinea Coast in 211,966 BCE. Died from an accident at age 40.

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.

"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.