HumanityReport.com

humanityreport.com — An interactive visualization of 300,000 years of human population.

From a few hundred thousand humans scattered across Africa to 8 billion today. The chart animates through the whole thing — ice ages, plagues, the industrial explosion, and that weird vertical line at the end where everything went exponential.

What it is

A single-page site with:

• An animated canvas chart you can drag around to explore different eras
• Historical markers (catastrophes, tech breakthroughs, civilizations)
• Stats and context about population dynamics
• A section where I asked various AI models to give their unfiltered take on the data

No frameworks, no build tools, no npm. Just HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS.

Running locally

php -S localhost:8000

Or any static file server. It's just files.

Building

If you change styles.css or script.js, run:

php build.php

This minifies the source files and updates cache-busting timestamps.

Project structure

index.html          # The page
styles.css          # Source styles
script.js           # Source JS (chart, animation, interactions)
ai_views.json       # AI commentary data
build.php           # Minifier

Why

I was curious what the full span of human existence looks like when you zoom out far enough that the last 200 years become a near-vertical line. Turns out it's pretty striking.

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Built by @robert-schmidt · View the site