About Eighth Billion

Why it exists

Almost everything that will shape a life is decided before the first breath: the country, the decade, the family's income, whether the household is urban or rural. That is an uncomfortable fact and an easy one to state loosely. This site states it precisely, with the data and the arithmetic on the page, and lets the reader feel the size of it by living one drawn life.

Why we built this

How it is made

The simulation is a deterministic TypeScript engine running entirely in the browser. It reads versioned JSON and binary life tables published with the site, plus a fixed list of sources. Two people with the same seed and the same data get the same life, on any device.

Methodology

Independence and originality

Every line of the simulation, every sentence on the site, and every visual asset was written or produced for this project.

Nothing is copied or adapted from another life-simulation site — not code, not copy, not imagery, not the visual design.

The only inbound code is the open-source framework layer, used under its own licences and listed in the notice file.

Data

UN World Population Prospects 2024 and World Bank World Development Indicators, each attributed on every page that shows a figure. The derived dataset is downloadable, versioned and checksummed.

Dataset, sources and licences

What it deliberately does not do

It does not use a language model at runtime. The text is written in advance; the numbers are arithmetic.

It does not simulate the future. All data is observed 1950–2023; projections are not presented as observations.

It does not claim more precision than the source supports. Death has a cause group, never a diagnosis.

It does not store anything about you on a server, because it has no accounts.

Contact

For corrections, data questions, or press, use the address on the press page. Correction requests about a specific figure are prioritised.

hello@lifein8billion.com

Now live one

The odds on this page describe populations. The game draws one birth and plays that life forward, year by year, from the same tables.