About 1 in 100 Billion
1 in 100 Billion (1in100b.com) is the social network of those who came before us. Only people who have died post here; the living can only read, like and follow. Right now it holds 671 sentences left by 316 people.
What the name means
About 117 billion people are estimated to have ever been born on Earth (Population Reference Bureau, 2022). Take away the roughly 8 billion alive today, and more than 100 billion have lived and gone before us. Every post here is a sentence left by one of them.
It is an estimate that reaches back into ages without records, so we round it to 100 billion.
The rules here
Every sentence here comes from something a person who has died really wrote: diaries, letters, poems, notebooks. We use only sources whose copyright has expired, and we have not made up a single sentence.
Each original was cut directly from a source text or checked against one character by character. Sentences we could not check are not here. Tap ⓘ on any post to see the original, its source, the text it was checked against and how it was checked.
Where an original cannot easily be shown as it is (hieroglyphs, cuneiform), or where we have not yet found a way to check it, the text comes from a trustworthy translation that is out of copyright, and we say who made it and when.
What you see first is our own translation of the original into plain English, made new for this site. It follows the meaning of the original and adds nothing, but the wording is ours. Tap See original on any post for the original text. Posts written in English appear as they were written. The original is set in a typeface that suits its script: a brush-like regular script for Classical Chinese, a Mincho or Myeongjo serif for Japanese and old Korean, Naskh for Arabic, Nastaliq for Persian, and faces modelled on early printing types for Greek and the Latin alphabet. The background of the box changes with the era: coarse fibres up to the 5th century, handmade paper for the 6th to 15th, laid paper for the 16th to 18th, smooth paper from the 19th on. Typeface and paper are there for atmosphere; they do not reproduce the actual handwriting or material. Where our translation is awkward or wrong, the original stands.
Replies are writings from other eras on the same feeling, placed one after another. They read like comments, but these people never actually answered each other. Only texts that were really exchanged, or really written in answer, carry a red label such as an actual reply. Threads that gather likes receive, one at a time, further replies chosen in advance.
The seal beside each name stands in for a face. Its colour shows the culture and its shape the era: a full circle up to the 5th century, a rounded square for the 6th to 15th, an octagon for the 16th to 18th, a double-bordered square from the 19th. The letters are taken from the person’s name in its own language.
The “For you” order is reshuffled every time you open it. Posts people have liked and followed come up a little more often, but one place in four is drawn regardless of that, and writings from the same culture or the same person do not follow one another. What any one person has viewed is never used for the order.
How this differs from other social media
People keep opening social media for good reasons and bad ones. The good: the feeling that you are not the only one, and the pleasure of coming across something unexpected. The bad: likes and notifications that arrive unpredictably, a feed that never ends, numbers that make you compare yourself with others, and the fear of missing out. This place keeps only the first kind. There are no notifications, the feed has an end, and since no one here posts anything new there is nothing to miss. The people here do not care about follower counts (every one of them follows 0), and they will never know you liked them. Nobody can fight in the comments, because the living cannot write. And what gets checked here is not whether someone is famous, but whether the sentence is really in the source.
Texts checked against
Hanguk Munjip Chonggan (collected works of Korean writers), original text · Old Korean songbooks as transcribed on Wikisource · Quan Song Ci (全宋詞) · Quan Tang Shi and Quan Song Shi (全唐詩·全宋詩) · a database of Chinese classical texts · Aozora Bunko · Japanese classical texts · a corpus of Persian poetry · Perseus Digital Library · The Latin Library · Project Gutenberg · Tolstoy Digital (complete works) · SuttaCentral Pali texts · the Tamil text of the Tirukkural · Wikisource