Human
A compendium of the species and the lives that shaped it
Realm · Open
Human
A compendium of the species and the lives that shaped it
The Human realm covers the species itself — biology, origins, and society — and the people whose work became part of the common record.
The second realm turns from the animals we live with to the animal doing the living. It begins with a general entry on Homo sapiens, then follows fifteen lives — scientists, rulers, artists, and travellers — chosen because their work is documented well enough to be checked, not because they are agreed upon.
- Entries
- 20
- Categories
- 5
- Status
- Open
In this realm
The shape of the subject
Browse by category
Category
Biology
The species: anatomy, genetics, development, and health.
Category
Origins
Evolution, migration, and the deep history of the species.
Category
Society
Language, cities, institutions, and the ways people live together.
Category
Culture
Art, music, literature, and the things people make for meaning.
Category
Lives
Biographies of people whose work is part of the public record.
Selected entries
Start reading
Biology
Human
Human beings are the only living members of the genus Homo: a bipedal primate that originated in Africa about 300,000 years ago, now numbers more than eight billion, and shapes the biosphere through language and cumulative culture.
Lives
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a South African-born entrepreneur who leads SpaceX and Tesla and founded xAI. His companies have reshaped electric vehicles and orbital launch, and his public statements range from Mars settlement to artificial intelligence risk.
Lives
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician whose 1843 notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine described an algorithm for a general-purpose machine and are often called the first computer program.
Lives
Sam Altman
Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur who leads OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. He previously ran Y Combinator and has become one of the most prominent public voices on artificial intelligence.
Lives
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, engineer, and anatomist whose few finished paintings and thousands of notebook pages made him the emblem of Renaissance curiosity and the most versatile artist of his age.
Lives
Marie Curie
Marie Curie pioneered the study of radioactivity, discovered polonium and radium with Pierre Curie, and became the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Lives
Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist whose work on backpropagation helped establish deep learning. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics and now warns about AI risk.
Lives
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein reshaped physics with special and general relativity and the light quantum, won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, and became the twentieth century's most recognisable scientist.
Lives
Dario Amodei
Dario Amodei is an American physicist and AI researcher who co-founded Anthropic and leads its work on Claude. He is known for early scaling-law research and for arguments that safety must shape how models are built.
Lives
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor whose plays and sonnets are the most widely performed and translated works in the history of English literature.
Lives
Cleopatra
Cleopatra VII was the last active ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a Greek-speaking Macedonian queen who allied with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and lost her kingdom to Octavian at Actium.
Lives
Demis Hassabis
Demis Hassabis is a British AI researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and leads Google DeepMind. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction.
A note on the set
This realm opens with the animals closest to us, but it is a living realm: entries are added, corrected, and re-cited. New realms are announced only when they are ready to read.