Is the 1 in 8 billion life simulation game accurate?
The odds are real. The person is not. Eight Billion Lives draws a made-up person from real statistics, and it tells you which numbers are data and which are estimates.
What comes from data
- Where and when you are born, and how long people live. Births and life tables come from the United Nations World Population Prospects 2024 (CC BY 3.0 IGO).
- Income and prices. Income comes from World Bank datasets (CC BY 4.0).
- Wars and disasters. Conflicts come from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, earthquakes and storms from US government data (NOAA).
- Cities and places. They come from GeoNames, and from the US Census and Statistics Canada for places in those countries.
The Sources and credits page lists every dataset with its licence and the date it was retrieved.
Every number is labeled
Each statistic in the game carries one of two labels. Sourced means the figure comes from the dataset named. Extrapolated means no dataset covers it, so it is estimated by the model named. Nothing is shown without one of the two. For example, income is measured only in survey years, so income in the years between is scaled from the nearest surveys and labeled Extrapolated.
What is modeled
- The person. Names, family members and the events in your life are generated. They are samples, not real people.
- The effect of your choices. How a decision changes your health, happiness, knowledge and relationships is a game rule, not a measurement.
- Years after 2024. A life that reaches the future follows one possible projection. It is not a forecast.
What the game is not
It is not advice, a prediction of your own life, or a measure of any real person. Some data is missing for some countries, and the game lists those gaps on the Sources page instead of hiding them.
Why the odds feel surprising
Most people are not born in the countries that dominate your news feed. The game does not pick a country at random and it does not favour the one you live in. It weights each country by its share of the world’s births, which is why a life here can start somewhere you did not expect. See how the game works.