About MYRIAD — The Parallel Lives Engine

MYRIAD is a statistical mirror. Give it four facts about yourself — when you were born, where, and roughly how you live — and it re-instantiates you across more than 150 countries and every decade since 1800, using real demographic and economic data.

Each "parallel life" answers a simple question: if the accident of your birth had landed differently, what would your life look like? How long would you live? What would you earn? Would you have survived childhood at all?

The engine behind MYRIAD combines historical series from the United Nations, the World Bank, the Maddison Project, NCD-RisC and Our World in Data into a single navigable multiverse, and condenses it into one number: your Lottery Score — your rank among the roughly 117 billion humans who have ever been born.

MYRIAD is not a horoscope and not a simulation of you as an individual. It is honest statistics about the staggering role of birthplace and birth era in shaping human lives. We document every method and every source on our methodology page.