Number of podcasts worldwide

Humanity has now produced enough podcasts and enough orbital debris that both statistics are hard to count, and both, apparently, are growing at approximately the same pace. One cannot help but notice the symmetry: above us, the detritus of old satellites; below, the detritus of old opinions. Both are difficult to clean up.

Orbital debris grew steadily through this period as satellite constellations expanded and older missions fragmented, with tracking capabilities also improving as the US Space Surveillance Network kept adding objects to its catalogue, while the podcast count exploded during 2020 as locked-down would-be broadcasters turned free time into microphones. Both are exponential-ish curves with unrelated mechanics that happened to look steepest in the same pandemic year.

So the correlation is what two accumulation problems look like in parallel. Neither is cleaning itself up. One day we will be buried in both, quietly.