SpaceX launches per year

Here we have two activities separated by roughly 400 million years of evolutionary divergence and several fundamental disagreements about what constitutes a productive use of human time, moving in perfect synchronisation like dance partners who have never met. One involves launching rockets at the cosmos in hopes of becoming a multi-planetary species, the other involves middle-aged men sliding into bags of dirt with moderate urgency. That they should correlate at 0.905 suggests either that the universe has a sense of humour, or that we are simply very good at finding patterns in clouds.

The real culprit here is likely economic optimism and disposable income, two things that tend to rise and fall together like a couple who finally agree on something. Wealthier years produce both venture capital willing to fund space companies and fans with money for tickets to baseball games, which themselves feed an entire ecosystem of merchandise, streaming subscriptions, and the kind of leisure spending that only happens when people feel reasonably confident about next Tuesday. Consider that 2015 saw roughly 6 SpaceX launches and 2,670 stolen bases, while 2023 brought 26 launches and 2,763 stolen bases—a nine-fold increase in rockets and a modest uptick in theft, united by nothing more mysterious than an economy that learned to believe in itself again.

We are pattern-seeking creatures trapped in a cosmos that contains infinite patterns, which means we are essentially doomed to periodically discover that the number of satellites launched and the number of times athletes steal second base have been gossiping about economic cycles behind our backs. This tells us nothing about rockets or baseball, and everything about our inability to resist a coincidence. We should probably just accept this and move on.