BBC interactive tells story of your life on earth

ENTER your date of birth, gender and height into this BBC interactive and see what extraordinary things have happened to the planet in your lifetime.

IF I didn’t feel old already, learning that a housefly my age would have produced a family of 11,000 generations certainly helped.

This is the sort of quirky and illuminating fact you can learn on BBC Earth’s personalised guide to you and the planet.

Simply enter your date of birth, gender and height and prepare to be amazed by the extraordinary story of your life on earth.

The interactive webpage shows the distance you’ve travelled around the sun since birth, the number of volcanic eruptions you’ve lived through and how much a redwood has outgrown you in your lifetime (yes, thanks BBC, I’m laughably short as well as old).

Visualise your journey through space and time.

It also offers a fascinating insight into the survival of different species, revealing that the black rhino was saved from extinction when I was 20, and that I turned 27 in the year the squat lobster was discovered in New Zealand.

There’s a bleaker picture here too, however. By the time I’m 84, both oil and coal will have run out, with gas not far behind.

Since my birth 30 years ago, the Antarctic ozone hole has increased by 7 million km-squared, and we’ve lost 277.5 million hectares of forest cover. The earth’s population has increased by 2,461,183,472.

If you’re interested in the natural world and your relation to it, this is a beautiful way to look at it. And you’ll know when to celebrate your Mercury birthday too.