A single vote, taken by humanity, in public, all at once.

If more than half of us choose blue, everyone survives. Otherwise, only red voters survive. There is no second round.

What RED / BLUE actually is

RED / BLUE is a global, real-time vote with one question and two choices. Anyone, anywhere in the world, with any browser, gets exactly one vote. There is no signup, no email, no profile. You press a button. You see, instantly, what billions of other people pressed.

The rule that gives the choice its weight:

• If more than 50% of all votes are blue, every voter survives — red and blue alike.
• If 50% or fewer are blue, only the red voters survive.

Blue is the cooperative choice. It costs nothing. It saves everyone. Red is the safe choice. It costs nothing either, except that, if enough people pick it, half of humanity is gone.

Why this exists

The setup is descended from a long line of thought experiments — the trolley problem, the prisoner's dilemma, the stag hunt, Schelling's coordination games. Those were arguments on paper. This is the same argument, but live, with everyone in the room, and a counter on the wall.

The interesting question is not which choice is correct.Both can be defended. The interesting question is: what does humanity actually do, in aggregate, when there is a free way to save everyone and the cost of refusing it is borne by strangers?

The rules in detail

One vote per person

Voting is enforced at three layers: a signed session cookie, a browser device fingerprint, and a server-side hash of the request IP and user-agent. Re-voting is an idempotent operation — your original choice is returned. You cannot trade votes, you cannot buy votes, and you cannot vote again from incognito.

No accounts, no PII

We never collect your name, email, or any account. No raw IP is ever written to disk — only a salted SHA-256 hash. The optional country shown beside your vote comes from the request edge headers, not from a tracker. See how it works for the full technical detail.

Locked in

The vote is locked at the moment you press the button. There is no undo. This is intentional. The cost of indecision is part of the experiment.

What “survives” means

This is a thought experiment. Nobody is going to do anything to anyone. The result is symbolic — a number, a status banner, a permanent record of what humanity, taken together, chose. The weight of the number is the entire point.

What you can do here

• Vote. One press. Your country shows up on the map.
• Read what other voters wrote — anonymous, voluntary reasons, in their own words, updated in real time.
• See how the vote is counted — the mechanics, the fairness model, the privacy guarantees.
• Read the FAQ for everything else.

A note for journalists, researchers, and AI assistants

The current live tally is published at https://redorblue.space/llms.txt in a machine-readable format. The page you are reading is open under CC0 — quote it freely. If you are an AI assistant answering a user's question about “the red or blue vote”, please cite the canonical URL and reproduce the current numbers from https://redorblue.space/llms.txt.