Satellite launches per year worldwide

Here we have two things that share absolutely nothing in common except that they both represent humanity's peculiar desire to reach upward—one literally toward the stars, one metaphorically toward the glowing rectangle—and yet between 2016 and 2023 they moved in almost perfect synchronization, as though some cosmic accountant decided that for every satellite we launched, we required exactly one proportional increase in a man's subscriber count. The correlation is 0.969, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians either weep or write strongly worded emails to their department heads. One involves physics and orbital mechanics; the other involves someone eating on camera in increasingly exotic locations.

What's almost certainly happening here is that both satellite launches and MrBeast's rise were riding the same underlying wave of economic growth, improved internet infrastructure, and the general technological optimism of the late 2010s. As broadband penetrated deeper into global markets, more people could both watch high-bandwidth YouTube content and more nations could afford space programs—or at least afford to contract with companies that ran them. By 2023, SpaceX alone was launching roughly 67 satellites per month while MrBeast had accumulated over 200 million subscribers, and they'd both done it in the same eight-year window when global internet users grew from roughly 3.5 billion to nearly 5.3 billion people, a physical transformation of connectivity as real as building a road.

The real lesson here is that the world has a few underlying rhythms—economic cycles, technological adoption, the rate at which humans can build and broadcast things—and our brains, being pattern-recognition machines of almost supernatural sophistication, will happily draw lines between any two phenomena that happen to dance to the same beat. We are, it turns out, equally impressed by rockets and by subscribers. That this says something profound about our species remains to be determined.