Thanks very much to Matt Podbury for the tipoff to this site.
The premise is a fascinating one...
What would happen if stories were drawn from actual data, randomized to give a valid representation of the human story? That's the question that was stuck in my head, and that drove this project forward. If you could draw a life at random from all of human history, what would it look like? Roll the dice, and see a genuinely random life, depicted as well as the data allow. Do it again and again, and what kind of pointillist painting emerges from all those colorful drops of humanity?That's the idea of anyhumanever. Over 100 billion humans, each with a story. We are at the freaky tail-end of a brutal human history; our lives are statistically anomalous in every way imaginable. If we can internalize the statistical strangeness of our current selves, at least the present will gain some of the credit it surely deserves.
Source: https://anyhumanever.com/about
To start with, WHEN was your person born?
That would make me 72 years old now.... not TOO far from my actual age, and I certainly know people around that age....
1952 would be the post-war period... and in the middle of the baby boomer period... If I was British I would now be claiming my triple-locked pension, and own a house worth a million pounds as I bought it decades ago....
WHERE would I have been born?
A heat map is displayed showing population clusters in that year.
I'm born on the Ganges Plain in India.
And I'm a girl... that changes things... it shouldn't, but it does...
I in 4 girls would not live beyond 5 years.... and my average life expectancy at birth would have been 50.
I would probably have got married young and had 5 children.
What happened in my case?
Here's the version that the site creates.
This is accompanied by other data on the typical life of the person.
And the final touch is an image of what I might have looked like....
And if you haven't already worked out... this is another part of the site where there's a bit of a 'problem' (for me at least - and perhaps you as well) with the way the site has been developed.
More information on this is provided by the creator - I'm trying to find who to credit and it's important that this is done, as some teachers - myself included - try to avoid AI usage in most cases. Others are happy to use it for a lot of things...
For teachers, there is additional information provided on the site and also a Sub Reddit where people can ask questions - and this is where the AI comments are interesting.
There are also links to other similar tools which provide a random human...
I've got my own ideas about how geographers might use the site, including comparisons between people with different life chances, and changes explored by Hans Rosling and Our World in Data.
Any thoughts and ideas welcome... I'll be sharing some in a future Substack post.
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