Satellite launches per year worldwide

It turns out that the more humans launch objects into the void, the fewer of them believe in a supreme being inhabiting it, which suggests either that satellites are aggressively atheist or that Americans have been gradually noticing that heaven remains conspicuously empty of launch windows. The correlation is so tight (0.955) that you could practically plot one against the other and draw a line that doesn't wobble. This is what happens when you feed enough data into a computer: it finds your meaning for you, whether it was there or not.

The real culprit, almost certainly, is that both trends ride atop the same economic and educational currents. As household income rises and more Americans pursue university degrees, space agencies get better funding while simultaneously, well-documented surveys show religious affiliation declines—especially among younger, more educated cohorts. Between 2005 and 2023, SpaceX went from an amusing startup to launching more tonnage into orbit than the rest of human history combined (roughly), while belief in God dropped from about 86 percent of Americans to nearer 79 percent. Neither change caused the other; they are two passengers on the same escalator, heading in opposite directions, both convinced they're moving independently.

The real scandal isn't that satellites make us atheists or that atheism launches satellites, but that we remain so desperate to find villains and heroes in our data that we'll match any two trends that happen to dance together. Spurious correlations are just statistics having a laugh at our pattern-seeking expense. We are the universe trying to understand itself, and so far the universe is winning.