Extreme poverty rate
Share of humans living on less than ~$2.15/day (2017 PPP). For most of human history, the answer was "almost everyone." Then, around 1820, the curve broke.
1820
90.0%
→
2022
8.5%
10.6× lowersource
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The atlas · progress
The history of human problem-solving.
For most of history, humanity barely moved on any axis that mattered. Then, around 1820, the Industrial Revolution kicked off compounding gains in nearly every welfare measure. The numbers below document what humans have actually solved, and the slope we’re still on. Sources: Our World in Data, World Bank, UN, ITU, Maddison Project.
milestones10
span1800-2026
Child mortality (under 5)
Share of children who die before their fifth birthday. The single starkest measure of whether a society works.
1800
43.0%
→
2022
3.7%
11.6× lowersource
Adult literacy
Share of adults who can read and write. Compounds across generations — every literate parent makes the next round of literacy easier.
1820
12.0%
→
2022
87.0%
7.3× highersource
Life expectancy at birth
Years a newborn can expect to live. Historically driven by child-mortality reductions; now also by adult-disease control and chronic-disease management.
1800
30 yrs
→
2023
73 yrs
2.4× highersource
Real GDP per capita (global)
Inflation-adjusted economic output per person. The quiet engine behind nearly every other metric on this page.
1820
$1,200
→
2022
$16,700
13.9× highersource
Electricity access
Share of humans with reliable access to electric power. Underwrites everything else: refrigeration, lighting at night, the internet, modern hospitals.
1900
3.0%
→
2022
91.0%
30.3× highersource
Internet users
Share of humans connected to the internet. The substrate of most coordination today and most of what optimism.fun is built on.
1995
0.8%
→
2024
67.0%
83.8× highersource
Kardashev scale (energy civilization type)
How much of a star’s available energy a civilization has learned to harness, on Kardashev’s Type 0-to-3 scale. Type 1 is full use of everything a home planet receives. This is the closest thing to a single number for "how advanced is humanity," and by design it does not care about GDP or population — only energy captured and put to use.
1973
0.7
→
2026
0.728
+4%source
Cost to reach orbit
USD per kilogram to low Earth orbit. This is the actual enabling metric behind Mars colonization — not a countdown or a mission tracker, but the cost curve that has to keep collapsing before Mars is anything other than a demonstration flight. Reusability is the whole story: the Space Shuttle was marketed as reusable and was still more expensive per kilogram than the expendable Saturn V that preceded it.
1981
$60,000
→
2026
$2,720
22.1× lowersource
Healthy life expectancy (HALE)
Years a newborn can expect to live in good health — distinct from life expectancy above, which counts every year alive regardless of health. This is the real longevity-progress metric: adding years to a life is easy to overstate as progress if most of those years are spent sick. HALE only rises when disease and disability compress, not just when death is delayed.
2000
59 yrs
→
2019
64 yrs
+8%source
what’s still on the table
The gains aren’t guaranteed. The next century is still ours to lose.
Progress on infectious disease, energy, and literacy compounds because someone is actively working on it. Stagnation is the default. Every metric above is the accumulated work of generations who chose hard, useful quests instead of easy ones.
see what’s open →