What If You Experienced Every Human Life In History

Introduction: The Journey of Life

Imagine that your life began roughly 300,000 years ago as one of the planet’s first humans. At this time, you lived in Africa near modern-day Morocco, and your life wasn’t too different from that of your hominid parents. You made crude tools, hunted, and gathered food and materials, until, eventually, you perished. But this was only the beginning. After dying, you traveled back in time to be reincarnated as the second human ever to live. While you didn’t remember your former life, your previous actions affected you nonetheless.

The Cycle of Reincarnation

After dying once more, you returned 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 lasted almost 4 trillion years. Since you only recalled the life you’re currently living, your psyche didn’t carry the entire weight of human history. However, each of your lifetimes still had a profound impact on your future selves.

The Impact of Ordinary Lives

Sometimes your influence on the world was obvious, but these major historical figures only accounted for a tiny fraction of your experience. Instead, your existence consisted mostly of ordinary lives, filled with everyday tasks like eating, laughing, working, and worrying. For approximately one-tenth of your 4 trillion years, you were a hunter-gatherer. For 60%, you were an agriculturalist, developing tools and techniques that you employed over roughly 800 billion years of working on farms.

Experiencing Human Activities

Across your lifetimes, you spent 1.5 billion years having sex and another 250 million years giving birth. In total, 20% of your existence was spent raising children, to whom you imparted a variety of cultural values that influenced the trajectory of generations. In some lives, you shattered those cultures through invasion and imperialism. In others, you suffered as your lands and loved ones were taken away. In over 1% of lives, you were afflicted with malaria or smallpox, while, in others, you treated these conditions—saving countless versions of yourself.

The Evolution of Human Life

In humanity’s early days, the average lifespan was fairly short. There were fewer lives to live, and your influence was usually limited to people physically near you. But as humans survived longer on average and Earth’s population grew, you started to spend more time reliving the same action-packed years. A full third of your existence came after 1200 CE and a quarter of it took place after 1750. At this point, technology and society started changing faster than ever.

The Acceleration of Existence

You invented steam engines, configured factories, and generated electricity, which powered the daily machinery of all of your later lives. You lived through revolutions in science, the deadliest wars in history, and dramatic environmental destruction. On average, each new life lasted longer, but the pace of your existence kept accelerating. Conversations that previously took months to unfold now happened in minutes. Business ventures that you built over generations transformed overnight. You enjoyed luxuries you never could have sampled before, even in your past lives as kings and queens.

The Impact of Modern Life

After living over 100 billion lives, you were 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. The internet makes your personal sphere of influence global, allowing you to collaborate with anyone, anywhere, without even leaving your home.

The Power and Danger of Technology

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.

The Future of Humanity

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?