I find the simulation and visualization of the same topic (albeit for US only) by DataFlow much more engaging and comprehensible. The project is based on data of a US survey.
Pretty entertaining to watch the bubbles change color/activity but be unable to go to their designated area because they're unable to break away from the bulk of their neighbors.
Like peer pressure, but really just an artifact of the chosen technology for the visualization
I think something similar can be done on the world-wide scale with MTUS (Multinational Time Use Study) data [0], with some creative interpolation. From what I gathered, OP's simulation is more of a live Fermi estimate, so it would be interesting to see the same done with greater precision.
I find it neat that the simulation appears to "pulse" almost like a heartbeat, because so many of our activities are tied to the clock and state changes disproportionately occur on the hour or half-hour. It's especially noticeable when using the "fast" playback option.
How different this would have looked before the invention of mechanized timekeeping!
I thought the same thing. I also found it surprising that the number of people on a smoking break was quite a bit higher than either of those - I wonder how many transition from intimacy to smoke break :D
Not sure about you, but most smokers I'm aware of smoke way more frequently than anyone can reasonably have sex. There would probably be significant benefits to swapping the frequency of those habbits, but I'm afraid there might be some practical concerns.
A net positive birth rate is still concerning. 8.2 billion people is a lot. All of the world’s problems, from energy sourcing to food production to climate change become harder and harder as the population continues to grow.
It’s easy to be complacent in developed countries because birth rates have come way down, probably because of increased wealth and better education/opportunity for women and girls - but this is not yet the case in developing countries, and the nature of exponential growth is that if it exists anywhere locally, then it will eventually come to exist globally.
It really doesn’t help to cut aid programmes to places that are most in need of development.
The Club for Rome estimates that global population will peak at just below 9 billion by the middle of the century and then begin a sharp decline, ending at under 7 billion by 2100.
This is really bad if your country's pension and welfare system assumes a certain ratio of people will be in the labor force, relative to the number of old and retired people, as most developed countries do. A declining birth rate is much worse than a slightly positive birth rate.
Maybe time to fix the ponzi approach to pensions and welfare instead of continuing to assume unlimited population growth on a finite planet.
Edit: it’s not that I don’t believe the population projections showing a peak later in the century (although I think the Club of Rome one in particular is inaccurate), it’s that these projections are based on there being continued effort to bring birth rates down, hence now not being the time for complacency or defunding these efforts.
What approach would you take without getting rid of the concept of retirement entirely? If people live longer than they can work, they have to rely on the support of those who work in the old age - and the worse the radio of working people to retired people, the harder it is for the society.
The only thing that can work (which is also what is happening in practice) is to continually adjust the “pension & welfare” age upwards to achieve the necessary balance between working years and retirement years.
The upshot is that everyone will need to save more for retirement than they do currently, whether privately or via taxation.
Well, that's what seems to be happening at least in Germany where I am. Retirement age goes up, retirement benefits (inflation-adjustment) go down, contributions to pension system go up.
It's always a bit of political struggle of course with back and forth, but the general trend is just that.
Nobody likes paying more and getting less, and it’s perceived as some kind of societal decline, but it’s more like a correction. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the high birth rates in developed nations declined, roughly, in conjunction with the rise of welfare states. Both are ways, roughly, of providing for yourself in the future. Both are unsustainable in their current forms.
We are living in the age of peak entitlement, where we draw down on the finite fossil fuel reserves of the past while simultaneously drawing down on the earnings of our children in the future.
This is the same thing. Human lifespan can't extend indefinitely, so if you continually adjust retirement age upward, eventually you adjust it to a point that nobody ever lives long enough to retire.
Total time would include the time I wasn't at work and some of the time I was. My kids lived under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next.
My mom parented between zero and few hours a week. Both her time and mine were representative of our respective generations. The major difference was her time spent was unchanged since before history.
And sometime between her gen and mine, US childhood was mostly eradicated.
Why do the estimated births/deaths per second counters have so much flicker? Surely you don't actually believe that the expected number of births/deaths per second fluctuates at 1dp precision multiple times per second?
> The continuously updating global population counter is based on current aggregate birth and death rates (approximating values such as those from the U.S. Census Bureau International Database or UN DESA). The "live" births and deaths per second are statistically generated fluctuations around these averages to enhance the dynamic feel.
Ok, so you added high-frequency random noise to the estimated averages to make it feel more realistic. To me, this makes it feel less realistic.
Anyway, don't mean to gripe, this is a cool project!
25% of individual seconds, but the average over an hour should be rock solid to several decimal places.
I think the more interesting fluctuations are those which change on an hourly ("checking the clock", spikes when people hear a chime or get notifications on the hour), daily ("eating lunch" spikes when UTC+8 hits lunchtime in eastern China and craters when it's noon in the middle of the Pacific), or other periodic basis.
It would be interesting if it could fluctuate depending on birth rates at different times of day in different countries. That way, it could at least have a bit of dynamism if, for example, India had the highest global birthrate and most births there occured during daylight hours.
Presumably time of day matters? I’m guessing more people give birth or have c-sections during the day (not sure if that’s true of fully natural births, but for induced and c-sections, seems very likely).
I'm surprised at the surface difference between birth and death rate because we're told the aggregate rate of increase is declining. The difference between the two suggests birth outruns death by 2:1 which feels steep for something which will max out in 2050.
I realise sub-saharan Africa continues to be high birthrate and is a huge component of world population, but the trend of increased economic activity to lower birth rate is really high worldwide, and most western economies in the OECD would be in decline, were it not for migration.
Wikipedia: "It may take several generations for a change in the total fertility rate to be reflected in birth rate, because the age distribution must reach equilibrium. For example, a population that has recently dropped below replacement-level fertility will continue to grow, because the recent high fertility produced large numbers of young couples, who would now be in their childbearing years."
That could be because most people in the world currently are young. Hypothetically even if birth rate remains constant but suddenly a huge portion of the population start dying due to age then it could flip suddenly
Right now at 14:54:05 UTC, it seems like Intimacy is at 0.16% and Warfare at 0.10%, so we got that going for us at least. Moving in the right direction at least.
Cool idea but for the actual results I have no confidence in it because it has grounding shown like pop sizes, locations / timezones etc, it's just vibe coded with stuff like this: "// Approx 7.68 hours - fundamental physiological need.", "label: 'Nutrition', // User's concise label". I don't see any real population dynamics.
There is something sobering and humbling at “seeing” 2 people die every second.
To realize that entire lifetimes of memory and experiences are disappearing so quickly.
Though I’ve probably seen that stat before, the site does a good job of making it feel “live” with the updating population count and live stats on everything else.
For sure, but on balance, during that second:
- A smart little girl aced her math test.
- A loving father smiled at his kid.
- A grandma blew out her 80th birthday candles.
Lifetimes in progress, building their own memories and experiences.
So, two people may have died in that second, but 8 billion people lived.
Wonderful. I always found the idea of billions of people particularly famous people doing something (anything) simultaneously as me, unbelievable for some reason. This somehow brings this issue front and center on a global scale. Well done.
>The initial concept was explored with the help of AI (specifically, Gemini), iterating through prompts to develop the core logic for a dynamic simulation. The goal was to create something engaging, all within a single HTML file – a testament to what can be achieved with focused iteration and modern web technologies.
Just the other day, walking through a sleepy country town (Hawks Nest, NSW, AU), I was explaining to my partner how I'd love to have an AR overlay of the town that told me, statistically, what each person in each house was doing.
Ideally it'd consider an estimate of the house's value and use vision to assess the real-time appearance of the property to further hone its model.
If you could do that next, please. Oh and buy me a Vision Pro. Cheers.
Could easily extend the idea to zoom in on the map, constraining to various region sizes... The information gets a little "washed out" when you combine all the timezones into one blob.
Combined they make up about 33% of all activity, which is what you would expect if 100% of people spent every single day doing one of those things for ~8 hours. It's pretty much right in line with what I'd expect, possibly even a bit higher considering small children and retirees.
Full time people spend roughly 24% of their week working.
Factoring in PTO/holidays, roughly 20 years of education and 20 years retirement, part time and unemployment, that number drops quite a bit (I’d guess roughly half, to 12%).
Of course, some people start work earlier and retire later, and some work more than 40 hours per week.
Great execution. Interesting to think about the peaks and troughs of global activity.
The Sleep numbers make a big claim: Right after Europe and West Africa have woken up (i.e. now) it says only 350 million people (4.25%) are sleeping. It's 01:08 in Anchorage and 06:08 in Recife. Over 1 billion people live in the Americas between these two time zones. Seems implausible that only a third of them are sleeping?
I think this is just going off sunrise and set +- some estimate. Which does not work as well the farther from the equator you get. It's light for hours up here before you wake, and we sleep like 2-4 hours after sunset.
Missed opportunity to add a "viewing this dashboard (0.00000125%)" stat since it already has the live viewers counter :)
yes. dumb me
Related:
I find the simulation and visualization of the same topic (albeit for US only) by DataFlow much more engaging and comprehensible. The project is based on data of a US survey.
https://flowingdata.com/2015/12/15/a-day-in-the-life-of-amer...
Pretty entertaining to watch the bubbles change color/activity but be unable to go to their designated area because they're unable to break away from the bulk of their neighbors.
Like peer pressure, but really just an artifact of the chosen technology for the visualization
Isn't rl peer pressure also an artifact of the chosen "tech", or in other words - an artifact of perspective
I think something similar can be done on the world-wide scale with MTUS (Multinational Time Use Study) data [0], with some creative interpolation. From what I gathered, OP's simulation is more of a live Fermi estimate, so it would be interesting to see the same done with greater precision.
[0] https://www.timeuse.org/mtus
I find it neat that the simulation appears to "pulse" almost like a heartbeat, because so many of our activities are tied to the clock and state changes disproportionately occur on the hour or half-hour. It's especially noticeable when using the "fast" playback option.
How different this would have looked before the invention of mechanized timekeeping!
The changelog indicates:
> * Fixed "Intimacy" count to always be an even number.
The FTX polycule would like a word…
Beautiful work!
Can one not be intimate with oneself?
Or with more than one other person
"What would you do if you had a million dollars Lawrence?"
Heck, Betty Dodson would like a word. I don't need anyone's help to be intimate!
Intimacy being almost the exact same number as warfare is pretty sad.
On a more joyous note, it's really neat projet, thanks.
Also sad that 7-8 times more a on a smoking break. Let's normalise taking a sex break.
One of the benefits of WFH.
Yeah made me wonder. But then again warfare is 24/7 while intimacy once every now and then.
As I watch it right now (18:38 CEST), it's about twice as much intimacy than war, so I guess it takes active war zones into account.
Make love, not war.
I thought the same thing. I also found it surprising that the number of people on a smoking break was quite a bit higher than either of those - I wonder how many transition from intimacy to smoke break :D
thanks you!
Sadder, the count in warfare is not included in paid work.
make love not war!
make love at war is also a great option
Compared to my parents, I spent 20x the time parenting (the new normal) and I'm not sure these stats reflect that.
Our global birthrate is a unconcerning 2.3 and worldwide restroom use continues apace.
Sex is edging out smoking but not by much.
Not sure about you, but most smokers I'm aware of smoke way more frequently than anyone can reasonably have sex. There would probably be significant benefits to swapping the frequency of those habbits, but I'm afraid there might be some practical concerns.
A net positive birth rate is still concerning. 8.2 billion people is a lot. All of the world’s problems, from energy sourcing to food production to climate change become harder and harder as the population continues to grow.
It’s easy to be complacent in developed countries because birth rates have come way down, probably because of increased wealth and better education/opportunity for women and girls - but this is not yet the case in developing countries, and the nature of exponential growth is that if it exists anywhere locally, then it will eventually come to exist globally.
It really doesn’t help to cut aid programmes to places that are most in need of development.
The Club for Rome estimates that global population will peak at just below 9 billion by the middle of the century and then begin a sharp decline, ending at under 7 billion by 2100.
This is really bad if your country's pension and welfare system assumes a certain ratio of people will be in the labor force, relative to the number of old and retired people, as most developed countries do. A declining birth rate is much worse than a slightly positive birth rate.
Maybe time to fix the ponzi approach to pensions and welfare instead of continuing to assume unlimited population growth on a finite planet.
Edit: it’s not that I don’t believe the population projections showing a peak later in the century (although I think the Club of Rome one in particular is inaccurate), it’s that these projections are based on there being continued effort to bring birth rates down, hence now not being the time for complacency or defunding these efforts.
What approach would you take without getting rid of the concept of retirement entirely? If people live longer than they can work, they have to rely on the support of those who work in the old age - and the worse the radio of working people to retired people, the harder it is for the society.
The only thing that can work (which is also what is happening in practice) is to continually adjust the “pension & welfare” age upwards to achieve the necessary balance between working years and retirement years.
The upshot is that everyone will need to save more for retirement than they do currently, whether privately or via taxation.
Well, that's what seems to be happening at least in Germany where I am. Retirement age goes up, retirement benefits (inflation-adjustment) go down, contributions to pension system go up.
It's always a bit of political struggle of course with back and forth, but the general trend is just that.
Nobody likes paying more and getting less, and it’s perceived as some kind of societal decline, but it’s more like a correction. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the high birth rates in developed nations declined, roughly, in conjunction with the rise of welfare states. Both are ways, roughly, of providing for yourself in the future. Both are unsustainable in their current forms.
We are living in the age of peak entitlement, where we draw down on the finite fossil fuel reserves of the past while simultaneously drawing down on the earnings of our children in the future.
This is the same thing. Human lifespan can't extend indefinitely, so if you continually adjust retirement age upward, eventually you adjust it to a point that nobody ever lives long enough to retire.
Shouldn't AI and more efficient production handle it? Maybe the problem is we don't distribute returns so well right now.
> 20x
What do you think the actual number is in terms of dedicated hours per day?
Total time would include the time I wasn't at work and some of the time I was. My kids lived under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next.
My mom parented between zero and few hours a week. Both her time and mine were representative of our respective generations. The major difference was her time spent was unchanged since before history.
And sometime between her gen and mine, US childhood was mostly eradicated.
Why do the estimated births/deaths per second counters have so much flicker? Surely you don't actually believe that the expected number of births/deaths per second fluctuates at 1dp precision multiple times per second?
> The continuously updating global population counter is based on current aggregate birth and death rates (approximating values such as those from the U.S. Census Bureau International Database or UN DESA). The "live" births and deaths per second are statistically generated fluctuations around these averages to enhance the dynamic feel.
Ok, so you added high-frequency random noise to the estimated averages to make it feel more realistic. To me, this makes it feel less realistic.
Anyway, don't mean to gripe, this is a cool project!
You'd have to add much more fluctuation to be realistic, it's a poisson process, about 25% of the seconds should be with zero births.
25% of individual seconds, but the average over an hour should be rock solid to several decimal places.
I think the more interesting fluctuations are those which change on an hourly ("checking the clock", spikes when people hear a chime or get notifications on the hour), daily ("eating lunch" spikes when UTC+8 hits lunchtime in eastern China and craters when it's noon in the middle of the Pacific), or other periodic basis.
It would be interesting if it could fluctuate depending on birth rates at different times of day in different countries. That way, it could at least have a bit of dynamism if, for example, India had the highest global birthrate and most births there occured during daylight hours.
Presumably time of day matters? I’m guessing more people give birth or have c-sections during the day (not sure if that’s true of fully natural births, but for induced and c-sections, seems very likely).
Might be due to sneezing.
Fun suggestion: move the "Live Viewers" counter to be a real entry on the site at the bottom.
Viewing this site: 40 (0.0000005%)
Accurate, saw restroom use tick up 1
I'm surprised at the surface difference between birth and death rate because we're told the aggregate rate of increase is declining. The difference between the two suggests birth outruns death by 2:1 which feels steep for something which will max out in 2050.
I realise sub-saharan Africa continues to be high birthrate and is a huge component of world population, but the trend of increased economic activity to lower birth rate is really high worldwide, and most western economies in the OECD would be in decline, were it not for migration.
Wikipedia: "It may take several generations for a change in the total fertility rate to be reflected in birth rate, because the age distribution must reach equilibrium. For example, a population that has recently dropped below replacement-level fertility will continue to grow, because the recent high fertility produced large numbers of young couples, who would now be in their childbearing years."
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum
That could be because most people in the world currently are young. Hypothetically even if birth rate remains constant but suddenly a huge portion of the population start dying due to age then it could flip suddenly
Funny how intimacy and warfare have the same numbers
Not really when both numbers are made up.
Not sure how I should understand `Warfare` and `Intimacy` having the exact same numbers ;-)
Means whatever the weapon, it’s fucking all the same
Right now at 14:54:05 UTC, it seems like Intimacy is at 0.16% and Warfare at 0.10%, so we got that going for us at least. Moving in the right direction at least.
There’s the problem.
Cool idea but for the actual results I have no confidence in it because it has grounding shown like pop sizes, locations / timezones etc, it's just vibe coded with stuff like this: "// Approx 7.68 hours - fundamental physiological need.", "label: 'Nutrition', // User's concise label". I don't see any real population dynamics.
*It has NO grounding shown
There is something sobering and humbling at “seeing” 2 people die every second.
To realize that entire lifetimes of memory and experiences are disappearing so quickly.
Though I’ve probably seen that stat before, the site does a good job of making it feel “live” with the updating population count and live stats on everything else.
For sure, but on balance, during that second: - A smart little girl aced her math test. - A loving father smiled at his kid. - A grandma blew out her 80th birthday candles.
Lifetimes in progress, building their own memories and experiences. So, two people may have died in that second, but 8 billion people lived.
And every second, another 4 are born.
Seeing the population still increase, this must be completely attributed to Africa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
There are still some parts of Asia that are below replacement birth rates.
I think you meant to say above
Yes, thanks
Wonderful. I always found the idea of billions of people particularly famous people doing something (anything) simultaneously as me, unbelievable for some reason. This somehow brings this issue front and center on a global scale. Well done.
Am I the only one surprised & perplexed about a phone representing “leisure”?
What single emoji would you choose instead?
It seems reasonable to me.
Beach umbrella, couch, person in lotus position, a book…
Nothing outrageous, but it’s an interesting shift of perspective.
The couch emoji I'd agree with! I suspect the others are far less common activities than browsing phone or lounging :)
the dancing or partying ones, although admittedly we all scroll the phone more
>The initial concept was explored with the help of AI (specifically, Gemini), iterating through prompts to develop the core logic for a dynamic simulation. The goal was to create something engaging, all within a single HTML file – a testament to what can be achieved with focused iteration and modern web technologies.
https://humans.maxcomperatore.com/why.html
Just the other day, walking through a sleepy country town (Hawks Nest, NSW, AU), I was explaining to my partner how I'd love to have an AR overlay of the town that told me, statistically, what each person in each house was doing.
Ideally it'd consider an estimate of the house's value and use vision to assess the real-time appearance of the property to further hone its model.
If you could do that next, please. Oh and buy me a Vision Pro. Cheers.
Thankfully, ABS has those stats for you. https://dbr.abs.gov.au/region.html?lyr=sa2&rgn=106031124
Your design of this page and your whole website is beautiful. How many years experience do you have with front end development?
Agreed. The world map showing evening, night and morning is a great visual to have updated in real time.
Love it.
If you plan on adding to it, would be cool see (maybe via heatmap) where the births/deaths are happening.
Some stats I'd like to see added:
* number of people in the air (Grok estimates 1.2 to 1.8 million, or 0.015% – 0.022%), but flightradar24.com probably has a better estimate.
* number of people in space (13 according to whoisinspace.com, so 0.00000016%)
* number of people at sea (?)
Only 6-7% of people are sleeping? Wouldn't you expect that to be more like 30%?
If half the earth's population lived in the pacific ocean, sure!
Depends on the time, no?
Population not being evenly distributed etc
yes. 18.7% at the moment.
[dead]
Reassuring to know there are 129 million bottoms joining me in bathrooms about now.
There are presumably some more bottoms joining in for the other categories too.
Could easily extend the idea to zoom in on the map, constraining to various region sizes... The information gets a little "washed out" when you combine all the timezones into one blob.
6 million intimate? Wonder how much this tracks stats by country, so as day/night moves along, can see bigger/lesser swings in the trend.
Or is it just a flat ratio to population.
That number is half of any serious estimation of the worlds prison population. I don't think most of the numbers are tracked.
Is it plausible that the order of magnitude of those going to the restroom and those being intimate would be the same?
My life is very different if so!
when I looked at it restroom use was 1.4% and intimacy was 0.13%, so an order of magnitude more. Seems about right.
Is anyone else shocked by how low the Paid Work and Education bars are? Is there a way to see this for specific countries?
Combined they make up about 33% of all activity, which is what you would expect if 100% of people spent every single day doing one of those things for ~8 hours. It's pretty much right in line with what I'd expect, possibly even a bit higher considering small children and retirees.
Wonderful work! If 0.13% are in jail, how many do you estimate are positively changing the world?
Roughly the same number of people who make love, make war. That's sad.
Pretty interesting project. A dynamic snapshot of human activity
16% are doing paid work? I always assumed that would be higher
Full time people spend roughly 24% of their week working.
Factoring in PTO/holidays, roughly 20 years of education and 20 years retirement, part time and unemployment, that number drops quite a bit (I’d guess roughly half, to 12%).
Of course, some people start work earlier and retire later, and some work more than 40 hours per week.
So to me, 16% seems about right.
was only 9% when i looked but then i realized its bc i live in opposite time of most of the world's population
cool idea and nice execution! one thought: maybe make the time scale on your mini graphs a little longer so you can see larger changes?
That does it, I'm going back to sleep.
I’m not even mad, I’m impressed.
Great execution. Interesting to think about the peaks and troughs of global activity.
The Sleep numbers make a big claim: Right after Europe and West Africa have woken up (i.e. now) it says only 350 million people (4.25%) are sleeping. It's 01:08 in Anchorage and 06:08 in Recife. Over 1 billion people live in the Americas between these two time zones. Seems implausible that only a third of them are sleeping?
I think this is just going off sunrise and set +- some estimate. Which does not work as well the farther from the equator you get. It's light for hours up here before you wake, and we sleep like 2-4 hours after sunset.
the declining number of people engaged in warfare is the saddest statistic.
One would hope that it's because they've decided to resolve their differences and lay down arms?
yes, I would hope too
[dead]
[dead]