Satellite launches per year worldwide

Somewhere in the vast indifference of space, a satellite launches into orbit every few days, and somewhere on Earth, Americans spend another forty million dollars on kibble and canned fish, and these two phenomena have decided, without consulting anyone, to move in perfect synchronisation for eighteen years. One might reasonably expect that pet food sales would correlate with, say, the number of pets, or perhaps the collective anxiety of the American middle class, but instead they have chosen to move lockstep with humanity's compulsion to fling expensive machines into the void. The universe, it seems, keeps its jokes running on parallel tracks.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly the economic tide lifting all boats, which is a nicer way of saying that between 2005 and 2022 nearly everything went up together because the global economy kept expanding and people kept getting richer and more willing to spend on both space programmes and premium cat nutrition. The real correlation is probably something prosaic like gross global GDP or US consumer spending, which would naturally drive both the aerospace industry's ambitions and the pet industry's discovery that humans will pay premium prices for something they feed to an animal that would eat a dead pigeon if given the chance. If you actually graphed the numbers, you'd see both lines creeping upward like something thawing in spring, a genuinely steady climb of about 7-8 billion dollars in pet food alone over that period, which is to say that Americans now spend more on pet nutrition annually than some nations spend on their entire space programmes.

The lesson, if there is one, is that our pattern-seeking brains are perfectly calibrated to find meaning in noise, and that two entirely separate human impulses—one to reach for the stars and one to spoil our animals—can dance together through time without knowing each other exist. We are all just things correlating with other things, satellites and Snausages included. The real mystery is why we're always so surprised.