Fatal dog attacks in the US

There is something almost touching about the way fatal dog attacks and satellite launches have decided to rise and fall in perfect synchrony over the past nineteen years, as though the universe were quietly running a test to see how long it would take us to notice that two completely unrelated human endeavors were holding hands. It takes a certain kind of pattern-seeking animal to draw a line between a golden retriever in Ohio and a SpaceX Falcon 9 leaving Cape Canaveral and declare them cosmically linked. We are, apparently, that animal.

The most obvious culprit is probably economic growth and population expansion, which tends to drive both dog ownership and space industry investment at roughly the same clip. As more people have disposable income, more people buy dogs, and more billionaires decide they would like to own rockets, which is a sentence that contains everything you need to know about the 2005-2023 period. Add in the fact that the US dog population has hovered around 90 million animals while launch rates have climbed from fewer than 50 per year to nearly 200, and you've got two entirely separate human appetites being fed by the same underlying economic conditions. We were just richer and more numerous, so we got more dogs and more satellites, the way you get more of anything when you have more of everything else.

The correlation is real—0.928 is the kind of number that makes statisticians uncomfortable at parties—but it tells us almost nothing except that we live in an era of simultaneous abundance and anxiety, where we feel compelled to both befriend animals and escape the planet. This is not a warning about dog attacks or a reason to defund NASA; it is simply what happens when you have enough money to pursue two completely unrelated obsessions at once. The universe, it turns out, is not speaking to us through the medium of fatal dog attacks and rocket launches. We are simply speaking to ourselves, very loudly, in two different directions.