Near-Earth asteroids discovered per year

There is something pleasingly undignified about the idea that the pace of planetary defence might be linked to how many peanut-butter chews Americans feed their dogs. One imagines NASA scientists glancing nervously at the dog bowl before consulting the telescope. The cosmos, one hopes, is amused.

Two unrelated upswings that both happened to steepen around 2020. Sky survey upgrades and better detection pipelines pushed annual near-Earth asteroid counts sharply higher, while the pandemic pet boom sent US dog-treat revenue surging as housebound Americans adopted animals and spoiled them to compensate for their own anxieties. One line is the work of automated telescopes; the other is the work of guilty remote workers.

So we are left with two rising lines that share nothing but their moment. The sky got busier and so did the treat aisle. Neither is waiting on the other.