Every card is a whole life simulated with the same engine and real statistics, from a random birth. Each card shows one moment of that life.
The odds, life expectancy and 2,000 simulated lives for the countries where most babies are born.
1Your birth
Your country or region is drawn by its real share of the world’s births in 2023 (UN World Population Prospects 2024), across 194 places. Your sex follows the sex ratio at birth there. Your family’s income rank comes from that country’s income distribution, and city or countryside from its urban share.
2Each year
Every year, the chance of dying comes from the life table for your age, sex and country. How far you go in school follows the country’s completion rates, and children from richer families tend to go further. Work, earnings, the age people marry and the number of children follow national figures from the World Bank and the ILO.
3Your choices
Decision cards (study harder, move to the city, take a job, have a child) change the odds, but they cannot remove the statistics of where you were born. On Auto, the game decides neutrally, so lives on Auto match the national averages. Automated tests check this against the source data for life expectancy, schooling, marriage and children.
4Is it real data?
The odds and averages are real. The people, names and events are made up from them. Events based on a statistic are marked in your life record. Where the World Bank has no figure for a place, we use the median of similar countries and mark it as an estimate.
Health
How your body holds up. Illness, injuries and age wear it down; care and rest bring some back.
Happiness
How the years feel. Love, friends and good news lift it; loss and worry pull it down, and it drifts back over time.
Knowledge
What you learn at school, at work and from life. It rises fastest while you are young.
Relationships
The people around you: family, friends, a partner, neighbours. Kindness and time together build it.
What is the 1 in 8 billion game?
1in8b is a free life simulator. You are born at random as one of the babies born right now — about 4.2 every second — and live one whole life, year by year, inside the real statistics of the place you were born.
What are the odds of being born in each country?
Your chance of being born in a country equals its share of the world’s births: about 1 in 6 babies is born in India, 1 in 15 in China and 1 in 36 in the United States (UN World Population Prospects 2024).
Where do the numbers come from?
Births, life tables and fertility come from the UN World Population Prospects 2024. Income, schooling, work, marriage and health come from World Bank and ILO statistics. Every event based on a real statistic says so in the life record.
How long does one life take, and is it free?
About an hour by default, with 30-minute and 90-minute options; you can pause or speed up to 16×. Every life is free from start to finish, with no sign-up or download.
Is this the same as 1in8b.life?
1in8b.app is an independent project, not affiliated with 1in8b.life. Both are built around the same idea: no one chooses where they are born.
What does 1 in 8 billion mean?
It means one person out of everyone alive, about 8 billion people. It is used to say someone is unique, or to describe how unlikely one exact outcome is.
What is 1 in 8 billion as a percentage?
1 in 8 billion is 0.0000000125%.