Any Human Ever is a very good single-purpose science-exhibit website. Pull the lever and see, in charts and graphs, the life story of a fictional but statistically plausible human being from a randomly determined point in Earth’s past.

I have “played” twice and thought I got lucky by getting people in the distant past—less likely, since most people who have existed have done so relatively recently—but then watched as both perished within weeks of birth for unsurprising reasons. OK, I just now tried again and pulled a Chinese farmer from the 25th century BCE who lived to 33 before typhoid fever finally carried him off. In any case, a stark reminder that, no matter how bad things seem out there, you are still almost certainly better off today than at any point in the past.

The site is transparent about its use of generative AI to extract or derive its source data. I do admit I had to hold my nose a bit to get past the extremely Claude Code aesthetics, which I have lately become more sensitive to.