Near-Earth asteroids discovered per year

Here we have two things that should be entirely unrelated—space rocks tumbling toward Earth and people failing to look both ways—moving in almost perfect synchronization for eighteen years, as if the universe were running a particularly obscure insurance actuarial experiment. One wonders whether asteroids have become subtly more accurate in their timing, or whether pedestrians have simply decided to match their fatality rates to whatever NASA discovers that week. Probably neither.

What's almost certainly happening is that both trends track the same underlying force: population growth and economic activity. More people walking means more pedestrian deaths, obviously, but more people also means more funding for astronomy, more equipment, better detection networks, more professional observers scanning the skies with increasingly sensitive instruments. Between 2005 and 2022, we went from discovering perhaps 150 near-Earth asteroids annually to over 1,000, a shift driven not by asteroids suddenly clustering toward us but by technology that can now spot something the size of a house from millions of miles away. Meanwhile, the pedestrian fatalities rose from about 4,800 annually in 2005 to nearly 6,500 by 2020, following the rhythm of vehicle miles traveled and urban density. Both rose because we were busier, richer, and more capable of finding things we weren't looking for.

The correlation is real and robust, which is precisely what makes it useless. We have discovered that as humanity gets better at detecting distant space debris, humanity also gets better at producing corpses on ordinary streets, and this tells us absolutely nothing about either phenomenon except that they obey the same economic heartbeat. The universe, it seems, has a sense of irony. But probably not the kind we think.