Satellite launches per year worldwide

Somewhere in the cosmic scheme of things, we have apparently decided that the number of objects we launch into orbit and the number of people trying to trick us into revealing our banking credentials must, for reasons known only to the universe itself, increase in perfect lockstep. One wonders if satellites are somehow broadcasting our email addresses to enterprising criminals, or if criminals are simply getting better at their jobs at precisely the rate we get better at launching things. Either way, we have achieved a kind of synchronized swimming between the heavens and the depths of human gullibility.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly just that both phenomena track the same underlying driver: the sheer expansion of the internet and its population. More people online means more targets for phishing schemes, obviously, but it also means more commercial and government demand for satellite services—weather forecasting, communications, GPS, all that infrastructure we've decided we can't live without anymore. Between 2005 and 2022, global internet users went from about 1.2 billion to 4.6 billion, which is roughly the difference between filling a large stadium and filling a small nation. The satellites and the scammers are both just riding the same tidal wave of digital adoption, which makes the correlation less mystical and more depressingly inevitable.

What we're really looking at is two different ways that humanity's rush to connect itself has created opportunity—one technological and aspirational, the other purely parasitic. The fact that they move together tells us nothing about causation, only that we live in an era where infrastructure and crime scale at the same velocity. It should comfort us that the universe, at least, is consistent. Even in its chaos.