Solar flares per year (C-class+)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the sun's temper tantrums and one man's decision to give away money on the internet move in perfect synchronisation, which suggests either that the cosmos is deeply invested in YouTube metrics or that we have simply become very good at finding patterns in the cosmic noise. The correlation sits at 0.910, which in the language of statistics means these two things are practically dating. One wonders what the sun thinks it is doing.

The real culprit is almost certainly that both solar activity and MrBeast's subscriber growth ride the back of a much larger wave: the exponential growth of internet connectivity and smartphone penetration between 2016 and 2023. As more people came online, they simultaneously became more likely to both watch viral YouTube videos and report solar observations through citizen science networks and space agencies. It is rather like noticing that pizza consumption and air travel tickets follow the same curve—not because pizzerias are launching people into the sky, but because both reflect a world getting richer and more connected. The global smartphone base roughly tripled in that eight-year window, a physical reshuffling of human attention that could easily drag two otherwise unrelated phenomena along for the ride.

We are, it turns out, pattern-recognition animals living in an age of abundant data, which means we will keep finding these beautiful, meaningless correlations like shells on a beach. The sun does not know who MrBeast is, and MrBeast's subscriber count has never heard of solar flares. Yet here we are, watching them dance together across eight years of charts, mildly astounded that the universe bothers to make jokes at all.