What if you experienced every human life in history?
Imagine that your life began
roughly 300,000 years ago
as one of the planet’s first humans.
At this time, you live in Africa
near modern-day Morocco,
and your life isn’t too different
from that of your hominid parents.
You make crude tools, hunt,
and gather food and materials,
until, eventually, you perish.
But this is only the beginning.
Because after dying, you travel
back in time to be reincarnated
as the second human ever to live.
While you don't remember your former life,
your previous actions affect
you nonetheless.
And after dying once more, you return
as the third person, then the fourth,
the fifth, and so on—
living the lives of every single human
that’s ever walked the Earth.
Strung end to end, these lives
last almost 4 trillion years.
Since you only recall the life
you’re currently living,
your psyche doesn’t carry the entire
weight of human history.
However, each of your lifetimes still has
a profound impact on your future selves.
Sometimes your influence
on the world is obvious,
but these major historical figures
only account
for a tiny fraction of your experience.
Instead, your existence consists
mostly of ordinary lives,
filled with everyday tasks like eating,
laughing, working, and worrying.
For approximately one tenth
of your 4 trillion years,
you’re a hunter-gatherer.
For 60%, you’re an agriculturalist,
developing tools and techniques
which you employ over roughly
800 billion years of working on farms.
Across your lifetimes, you spend
1.5 billion years having sex
and another 250 million years
giving birth.
In total, 20% of your existence
is spent raising children,
to whom you impart a variety
of cultural values
that influence the trajectory
of generations.
In some lives, you shatter those cultures
through invasion and imperialism.
In others, you suffer as your lands
and loved ones are taken away.
In over 1% of lives,
you’re afflicted with malaria or smallpox,
while, in others, you treat
these conditions—
saving countless versions of yourself.
In humanity’s early days,
the average lifespan is fairly short.
There are fewer lives to live,
and your influence is usually limited
to people physically near you.
But as humans survive longer on average
and Earth's population grows,
you start to spend more time reliving
the same action-packed years.
A full third of your existence
comes after 1200 CE,
and a quarter of it takes place
after 1750.
At this point, technology and society
start changing faster than ever.
You invent steam engines, configure
factories, and generate electricity,
which power the daily machinery
of all of your later lives.
You live through revolutions in science,
the deadliest wars in history,
and dramatic environmental destruction.
On average, each new life lasts longer,
but the pace of your existence
keeps accelerating.
Conversations that previously took months
to unfold now happen in minutes.
Business ventures that you built
over generations transform overnight.
You enjoy luxuries you never
could have sampled before,
even in your past lives
as kings and queens.
After living over 100 billion lives,
you're finally reborn as the youngest
person alive today.
But despite living through 300,000 years
of human history,
your actions have more impact today
than 99% of your past lives.
High-speed air travel allows you
to carry contagions and cures
across an ocean in hours.
And the internet makes your
personal sphere of influence global,
allowing you to collaborate with anyone,
anywhere, without even leaving your home.
In recent lives, you’ve invented tools
to rewrite the genes of living organisms,
permanently altering
their future generations.
And in this life, you might create
even more technologies
that make the world safer, kinder, and
more equitable for countless future lives.
However, one careless invention could
just as easily be catastrophic.
Between nuclear weapons, lab leaks,
climate change,
and other existential threats,
humanity's risk of inducing our own
extinction has never been higher.
In this fast-paced, interconnected world,
it’s frighteningly easy to undo
all of humanity’s progress,
or potentially, cut short
all your possible futures.
There's no way to know what
will happen next.
But what’s clear is that
your potential is limitless.
So, how will you spend this life?
And what can you do to work
towards a better future
for all your lives to come?
