Satellite launches per year worldwide

It turns out that humanity's impulse to launch things into space and humanity's impulse to record itself talking about those launches move in almost perfect synchronisation, which suggests either that we are far more predictable than we'd like to believe, or that the universe enjoys a joke at our expense. Between 2010 and 2023, for every satellite we nudged toward the heavens, we seemed to spawn exactly 0.96 podcasts about it, as if some cosmic ledger-keeper was balancing accounts we didn't know we were keeping. One begins to wonder whether we're exploring space or simply documenting our need to explore space while someone else documents that documentation.

The most likely explanation is far less mystical than it appears: both satellites and podcasts are products of the same underlying boom in global connectivity and venture capital optimism. As internet infrastructure improved and smartphone adoption exploded, suddenly everyone could launch a podcast (it costs almost nothing and requires only the delusion that the world needs to hear your thoughts), while simultaneously, telecommunications companies and space agencies got serious about satellite internet, observation networks, and the general industrialisation of orbit. Between 2010 and 2023, the global population grew by roughly 1 billion people, smartphone users grew from 500 million to 6.6 billion, and the barrier to entry for both podcasting and commercial spaceflight collapsed at almost exactly the same moment in history.

What we're really looking at is two different expressions of the same technological momentum: a world getting faster, more connected, and increasingly convinced that the answer to any problem is to document it or orbit above it. The correlation tells us nothing about causation and everything about living in an era where the infrastructure that makes podcasts possible is the exact same infrastructure that makes cheap satellite launches possible. We are, quite literally, launching more things into space so we have more things to talk about while we launch them. Pattern-seeking creatures in an age of acceleration.