Visualize 4B Years: The Trillions of Generations: LUCA to Modern Human | Hacker News Reader

Visualize 4B Years: The Trillions of Generations: LUCA to Modern Human

g9n.com

17 pointsappsoftware13 comments

Scrolled for like a minute in both Chrome and FF nothing happened except my finger got really tired. The numbers moved but all I see is a picture of a young child. Not sure what is supposed to happen.....

It moves eventually, but the images chosen are few and far between, and oddly incongruous

I agree it needs more images. On desktop there is space to show some encouraging text changes as you go. The unfathomable amount of scrolling required is sort of the point.

It works, I got 16mya in 5 minutes, one swipe is like 10000 years. My first thought was it should be faster but no, it should be slow to really show the scale. While I was scrolling I was hearing "age of war" soundtrack in my mind.

Thank you. Yes the huge amount of time it takes to scroll is kind of a feature, not a bug (in my mind)! The huge numbers of ancestors needed to see a step change is the point I was hoping to make.

Where are the images sourced from? I'm not necessarily against AI illustrations... but making recreations of extinct species right is a tricky multidisciplinary thing, not something AI can do well without a great deal of tweaking and domain-specific knowledge. If it's AI, it would be good to know the prompts and what specific features they mention, because then we'd know the actual methodology.

Edit: Don't waste your time scrolling. The images are a complete joke. There are some bad recreations out there - these are worse than you can imagine.

They are Gemini generated images. The original idea was to get my kids to draw pictures for each change, but their enthusiasm was not quite what I envisaged! Wanted to get it out there so AI to the rescue on that one. I agree it does cheapen the experience a bit :)

I made a tool to help us visualize how many generations of life on Earth it took to get to you. From the LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) bubble to modern Human (some scrolling required!)

80% there. The next step would be to generate many more versions of that picture. Even if you go back into the 80s, the hairstyle should change. If you go back into the 1800s, you probably don’t have the bright colors in the shirt. If you go back earlier, it might not be cotton but hemp. Etc. I think with generative AI it should be possible to slowly morph the one person from today in today’s clothing all the way back to Lucy, one picture at a time. Then, the effort of scrolling would actually be worth it!

That's an interesting idea. Like a flick book of AI generated images. I wonder what the best tool for that would be.

Or a video that moves forwards backwards depending on scroll position ...

It is unsettling to think that all these ancestors learned to survive and reproduce, so many times over.

While it is difficult to connect to a bug (sorry for that, distant family), going to the 1000s and knowing how hard it was for peasents at that time make you appreciate their efforts.

Doesn't work on mobile browsers.

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