Despacito YouTube views

It is a strange comfort to imagine NASA's annual budget rising in time with Despacito's YouTube counter, as though planetary science were somehow funded in reggaeton streams. Both are exponential. Both are slightly out of fashion. Only one of them lands on Mars.

What's actually happening is that both numbers grow because time grows. Despacito's view counter is monotonically increasing as long as YouTube exists, while NASA's nominal budget rises each year with general inflation and political appetite. Neither has a meaningful causal connection to the other; they're two upward escalators in the same building.

So the correlation is one of statistics' oldest tricks: two things that mostly go up will mostly look like friends. The cosmos and the chorus, both compounding. Time, as ever, is the third party.