Tinder paid subscribersNear-Earth asteroids discovered per year
Astronomers discovered more near-Earth asteroids and Tinder converted more subscribers between 2015 and 2023, and the two numbers rose together (r = 0.958) with a philosophical symmetry that nobody commissioned. We scan the sky for threats; we scan the app for matches. Both categories are dominated by objects that are probably not going to hit.
Near-Earth asteroid discoveries climbed from about 1,550 per year to over 3,000 by 2023, powered by new survey telescopes (Pan-STARRS, ATLAS) and eventually the Vera C. Rubin Observatory; Tinder paid subscribers grew from around 560,000 in 2015 to over 10 million by 2023, as Tinder Gold and Platinum converted a larger fraction of the user base. Both are stories of pattern-recognition systems scaled up: one detects dim dots against star fields and checks if their orbits cross ours, one detects user preferences and checks if they match someone else's. The false-positive rates are, in both cases, non-trivial.
A new rock is cataloged. A match appears in the inbox. Both, usually, pass at a safe distance.
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