viz.
One night only · everyone is invited
Tonight, every human alive shows up to the same field. Each guest gets one meter of personal space. Watch how much of the map we actually need.
The year
The guest list
The venue
Every guest stands with one meter of clear space in front and one meter to each side. Shoulders are about 45 cm wide and a body is about 25 cm deep, so each person books a patch of 1.45 m by 1.25 m. Call it 1.8 square meters of very personal space. No mosh pit tonight.
That is a square about 122 km per side. The planet has about 149 million km² of land. Tonight's venue uses 0.01 percent of it. We are a much smaller show than we feel.
Same venue, different century. Press play on the stage and watch twelve thousand years of guests arrive, drag the year slider, or jump straight to a stop on the tour. The crowd grows for all of history, sells out in the 2080s, and then, for the first time ever, starts to shrink.
Every human on the planet fills one large farm. The whole species is one small festival crowd.
Rome rules a quarter of everyone. The entire species still fits inside one modern city's limits.
All of medieval humanity needs about a third of Greater London. Every knight, every monk, everyone.
Almost one billion. It took our species all of history to sell the first billion tickets.
The crowd more than doubles in 150 years. The show starts feeling big.
The largest audience humanity will likely ever have, according to UN projections. After this night, the crowd starts going home.
The stage is yours. Tap anywhere on the map, or type a city or country in the search box, to move the venue. Try an island: when the land runs out, the gates close and the sign tells you how many got in. Type any number of guests, or invite all 117 billion humans who have ever lived.
How this was made. Each guest occupies 1.8 m², from one meter of clear space ahead and to the side of a standing body. The crowd spreads outward from the point you tap, walking only on land, hugging coastlines, at equal walking distance around bays and islands. The map is an Equal Earth projection, so areas are true everywhere. Land shapes come from Natural Earth (1:50m). Population estimates are from the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) and the UN World Population Prospects medium projection, via Our World in Data. The count of everyone who ever lived is the Population Reference Bureau estimate. Small islands below the map resolution may be missing. When you pick a city, its dashed line is a circle with the city's approximate municipal area, real city limits are knobblier, and guests who do not fit inside go gray. Country lines are the real borders, and a country's crowd rides ferries between its islands. When the land itself runs out, the leftover guests float in the sea, tinted by the water above them. Nobody was harmed, everyone was seated, no gummy bears were eaten during production.
Sources: Our World in Data, population · Natural Earth · PRB, how many people have ever lived