Despacito YouTube views

It is a strange thing to discover that humanity's catalog of nearby asteroids has grown in step with the view count of a 2017 reggaeton hit, as though Luis Fonsi were somehow responsible for planetary defence. The universe delights in juxtapositions of this sort. Cosmic debris and cosmic earworms, hand in hand.

Asteroid discoveries rose across this period largely because of funding and telescope upgrades — new sky survey systems and improvements to existing pipelines pushed annual detections sharply higher, with 2020's jump amplified by new automation. Despacito's view count, meanwhile, kept compounding as locked-down households defaulted to YouTube in record numbers. One trend was astronomers automating the sky; the other was a planet automating its leisure.

So the correlation is really two upward curves with no shared cause beyond the arrow of time, which is how most such things work in the end. Neither asteroids nor reggaeton care who's watching. Both kept going.