Every figure here comes from a real source. A few come with honest footnotes. We owe you both.
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Children were born · Humans left
The UN counts roughly 132 million arrivals and 63 million departures a year. The arithmetic of it is, we admit, unsettling.
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Hands were held, somewhere
Unsourced · Included on purpose
Nobody counts this. We estimated it the way anyone would: by wanting it to be true. If it comforts you, the number is almost certainly too low.
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Songs were heard, somewhere
About seven trillion streams a year, which is 222,000 a second, which is a lot of people being moved at once, quietly, in different rooms.
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Meals were prepared and shared
Not every meal is shared. We're using "shared" loosely, and a little wishfully.
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Pages were turned, cover toward close
This one required some arithmetic. We counted active readers, average pace, time zones. The result feels right. The result may not be right.
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Dollars were spent on war
$2.887 trillion in 2025. Another record, up 6.1% in real terms. The eleventh consecutive year of growth. Europe rose 14%; Asia and Oceania rose 8.1%, the largest annual rise since 2009. The number went up. We expected that. We did not stop expecting it.
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Tons of carbon joined the air
38.1 gigatons in 2025. Also a record. Records, on this side of the ledger, tend to be the wrong kind.
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Questions were asked of AI, not people
By February 2026 it was closer to 3 billion. By the time you read this, higher still. The number is chasing itself. We are using the last one that was actually counted.
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A species vanished
Roughly one species per hour. The exact rate is debated, and we understand the impulse to debate it. The direction is not in dispute.
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Readers were counted
Vercel Web Analytics · Cloudflare Web Analytics · Google Fonts · our host's log
Vercel counts page views and a few moments: the seal opened, a share, this panel opened (each with how long you had been reading), and a shared link followed. Cloudflare counts page views and how quickly the page loaded. Google Fonts sent the typefaces. Each received your IP address and your browser's name, as every server you contact does. The moments carry nothing that identifies you. Our host logs every request (IP address, browser, page, where you came from, the time), and we keep a copy of that log to see where readers come from and to count them, one per IP address and browser.
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A sister piece
What Color Was The Sky asks a similar question about yesterday's light, reconstructed from atmospheric data. Vol. II of what is now, apparently, a series.