What is terra-chronos?

Terra Chronos is an interactive simulation that shows fifteen thousand years of human civilization playing out on a spinning 3D globe. It covers the span from 13,000 BCE up to the year 2000, showing how population spread and changed across more than twenty five regions of the world over time. Population is shown as thousands of glowing dots on the globe, with each dot standing in for a cluster of people in a given region. As the simulation moves forward through history, the dots shift position, grow in number, and change color to show what kind of society lived there at that point, such as hunter-gatherer, farming, urban, imperial, feudal, or industrial, including periods of collapse. The population numbers behind the dots are based on real historical population research rather than invented figures. The simulation pauses at the start of every thousand year period. From there the viewer can either continue watching history unfold as it actually happened, or switch into what the project calls a counterfactual mode. In that mode, the viewer types a short what if scenario, such as a plague wiping out an empire at a certain point in time, and that text is sent to an AI language model running locally on the viewer's own computer. The AI model responds with an altered version of the world for the following thousand years, and the timeline permanently branches from there to follow that new imagined history. Behind the visuals, the project keeps track of population statistics, shows a running counter and small charts, and highlights the top regions by population as the simulation moves forward. It automatically saves progress in the browser and lets a viewer export the underlying data as a CSV file. A quiet background hum also shifts in pitch as the centuries pass, adding an ambient layer to the experience. The project is built with JavaScript running in the browser, backed by a small Python server that talks to the locally run AI model.