Human Map

Human Map is a living picture of humanity's heartbeat. Every dot on the map is a country, placed at its real position on the globe, and it flashes green the instant a baby is born and red the instant someone dies. Nothing here is a live news feed · every pulse is generated from the maths, using each country's real population and its crude birth and death rates.

How the maths works. A country's crude birth rate is the number of births per 1,000 people per year; the crude death rate is the same for deaths. Multiply the rate by the population and you get births (or deaths) per year; divide that down to the millisecond and you know, on average, how often that country should light up. Big, fast-growing countries like India and Nigeria flash constantly; small or ageing ones flash rarely · which is exactly how the real world behaves.

Filter and explore. Switch between births only, deaths only, or both, and watch the running totals climb. Hover or focus any country to see how many births and deaths it has notched up since you opened the page, and the small leaderboard shows where the most is happening.

Why it is striking. Seen one at a time, a birth or a death is an abstraction. Seen as a flickering map, the scale and rhythm of human life becomes something you can feel · roughly four births and two deaths every second, worldwide, the clock never stopping.

Rates are drawn from the UN World Population Prospects. Part of the PlayMemorize family · runs entirely in your browser and works offline as a Progressive Web App.