This is an idea that I’ve been working on, one way or another, for about 14 years. It may be more than that, but either way that’s a long bloody time.

I originally came up with it when I was working at the BBC website, and I gradually got a few people there properly interested in it. Long story short, it never happened… and I think, when I explain what it is, you’ll see why. I think it was probably just a bit too big and square-peg-round-hole, and the BBC was really focussed on other things (like iPlayer) at the time. Anyway.

Now, a few of the necessary stars are aligned to let me try to do it myself. I have more time now that my small humans are older, and the invention of ChatGPT and editors like Cursor means I have access to the coding wisdom that I need to get the basics off the ground.

Disclaimer: I’m a bit of a generalist/master-of-none type, so I’m likely to get lots of things badly wrong as I try to get this working. But this isn’t about getting it all right, it’s about getting enough of it right enough to be able to explain itself. My hope is that I can get the idea that’s been there for so many years out there in some way, rather than it just being the subject of endless pub conversations about something I never got around to.

So… what is Lifespan?

“This is the time, and this is the record of the time.”
— Laurie Anderson, From the Air (1982)

“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears… in… rain.”
— Roy Batty, Blade Runner (1982)

“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

What. Is. Lifespan. Question-mark.

The idea is to create a structured, interconnected, explorable timeline of all events, entities, and individuals. It is simultaneously personal and universal, a system to map individual experiences against the backdrop of history. It’s a way to visualise how every human life, idea, or event fits into The larger timeline of everything.

There are some core concepts.

Every entity - people, organisations, bands, wars, governments, all the things - can be seen as a span. Spans have a start and, if they’ve finished, an end. Those points in time, along with other things that don’t have any duration, are events, or atoms1

Atoms can be very precise, or a bit fuzzy, depending on what we know. I’m reliably informed that Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon on July 21, 1969, at 02:56:15 UTC, but we’re not quite so sure when Charles Darwin arrived in the Galápagos Islands… it was around the 15th or 16th September 1835. For example.

As well as being bounded by them, spans can contain atoms, and they can have connections to other spans. The voyage of The Beagle is a span in its own right, but also a subspan of Charles Darwin’s span. Spans can have parent-child relationships, as well as temporal relations in the sense of James Allen’s 1983 paper on the subject. More on that another time.

This way of thinking isn’t exactly new, of course… as I said, people have been thinking about temporal relations for a long time (meta), and there are lots of big and serious projects in this area. But a way for a person to explore and interact with all the things that have ever happened - merging personal and historical perspectives - has always felt like something that doesn’t exist, and that could.

The central type of question that Lifespan answers is the kind we ask each other all the time:

“what were you doing when you were my age?”

or

“what was happening when that happened?”

Once you think about it, you see these questions all the time whenever you have a conversation with someone and are trying to get to know them, or when you listen to podcast interviews with people. It’s a way to picture someone and their story, like looking at a time map and seeing where you are relative to them and other things.

So what is Lifespan? Lifespan is Wikipedia built by Tralfamadorians2 — a collaborative, generative system where users can explore, navigate, and contribute to a representation of time.

It’s probably easier if I show you. So I’m building a prototype, and you’ll be able to see for yourself. It’s about time.

  1. “An atom of time or “a-tom” (“indivisible” in Greek), refers to the smallest possible unit of time.” - Wikipedia ↩

  2. Tralfamadorians are extraterrestrial beings from the works of Kurt Vonnegut… you should read “Slaughterhouse-Five” if you have’nt. They are 4-dimensional, and see all of time simultaneously. ↩