Satellite launches per year worldwide

We have somehow reached a point in human civilization where the number of objects we hurl into the void above Earth correlates almost perfectly with the amount of money we spend on flavored rubber rings for dogs to chew on, and neither of us should be surprised by this. The universe expands, satellites multiply, and somewhere in America a golden retriever is getting a new salmon-flavored dental toy, and they rise together in a cosmic dance of complete indifference to each other's existence. This is not a metaphor.

The truth, which is somehow less interesting and more interesting simultaneously, is probably that both trends are simply riding the same wave of general economic expansion and rising middle-class purchasing power between 2005 and 2022. The dog treat market exploded because people got richer, had more pets, and suddenly felt morally obligated to spend fifteen dollars on a single chew toy instead of just giving Fido a carrot; meanwhile, satellite launches accelerated because the price of getting things into orbit dropped dramatically—SpaceX made rockets reusable, telecommunications companies wanted cheaper internet anywhere, and venture capital developed an almost pathological interest in space. Both satellites and dog treats benefited from the same rising tide of technological optimization and disposable income that characterizes early twenty-first-century late capitalism, which is to say they're both passengers on the same train and have never once acknowledged each other.

What we're looking at is not causation but a kind of statistical echo—two completely unrelated human behaviors amplified by the same underlying economic forces, moving in lockstep like dancers who were hired separately and never met backstage. The correlation is real, the relationship is meaningless, and somehow this feels like the most honest thing we can say about patterns in data. We see what we want to see.