What Is the Veil of History?
The Veil of History is a birth-weighted thought experiment. If you were born at random as any human who has ever lived, where and when would you most likely arrive?
Why 117 billion matters
Roughly 117 billion humans have ever been born. That means the people alive today are only a small slice of the full human story. A random draw across all humans is not a random draw across countries today; it is mostly a draw from the deep past.
What life would you probably get?
You probably would not be a king, a noble, a famous inventor, or even a modern person. You would most likely be a farmer, herder, or laborer in a pre-modern agrarian world, with little chance of literacy and a high risk of dying in childhood.
Why modern life is rare
Electricity, clean water, modern sanitation, mass literacy, and low child mortality are concentrated in the last few generations. Across the full history of human births, modern comfort is the exception rather than the default.
How the model works
The model weights each era by the number of births in that era, then estimates regional shares from historical population data. The era totals are relatively strong; the regional split is explicitly treated as an estimate with uncertainty.