...the Space Opera continues, folks, while down here on the terra firma of the coming Venetian Space Empire, folks are being told to be worried about asteroids and meteors.... be very worried:

Chelyabinsk fireball shows meteor threat bigger than originally thought, scientists say

This is intriguing from so many angles and raises so many "socio-political" issues that one doesn't know where to begin.

But perhaps one should begin here: if one wanted to nudge along one's nefarious plans for some sort of "world government", the way to do it, as President Ronald Reagan repeatedly suggested, was for some sort of "threat" to occur to Earth from outer space. Surely then, he told his counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSA and USSR would join forces and save everybody (or something like that). Mr. Gorbachev's response was equally if not more illuminating: "Not just yet." It wasn't the idea that Mr. Gorbachev objected to, merely the timing (after all, at that time, the Soviet Union's finances were teetering on extinction). And Mr. Gorbachev had reason to be concerned. Not only were those pesky UFOs turning off and on American ICBMs, but in one now famous incident, they had managed to do the same to some Russian ICBMs in the Ukraine, to the point of starting the launch sequences, much to the horror of the officers in charge of the battery.

So the problem was, and is, how to leverage a massive military effort and buildup in space? Answer: threats of asteroid collisions with Earth. How to ratchet up concerns? Lob a few at Earth, blow them up, and then, well, then tell everyone "oops, there's a whole lot more of them out there that we should be worried about than we first thought." We need lots of fancy things - lasers, particle beams, space-based electromagnetic rail guns, a few big sized thermonukes, a few plasma cannon, to blast these things apart if necessary, and bore some neat nifty holes in the more cooperative asteroids so we can mine them (think of those nicely symmetrical holes that "appeared" in Guatemala and elsewhere a few years ago. See Guatemalan Sink Hole. Not to worry folks. The UK's Daily Mail and many other outlets have reassured us that this neat, nifty, almost perfectly symmetrical sink hole, was the result merely of a tropical storm. And it probably was, Nothing to see here or be concerned about. Move along.).

Now, if you're like me, I suspect you're entertaining the high octane speculation that this doesn't quite look like an ordinary sink hole and that maybe "someone" sent a little message by boring a big shiny hole in the Earth, that the Chleyabinsk meteor explosion and the calls for asteroid defense issued by the Russian government a month before the event, and now the sudden "discovery" that there's a hole...er...whole lot more asteroids to be worried about than before and we should really get busy and beef up planetary defenses, is more than a little disturbingly coincidental. It's more like the behavior of people toying with ideas of planetary invasions or the potential there-for. (Maybe they mined someone else's asteroid already, and someone else didn't like it too much, and they're not telling us that someone else is throwing their asteroids at us, or threatening to do so. You never know... But not to worry. The ever-resourceful Japanese have come up with a workable space cannon as their country melts into a radioactive glow around them. Scale that puppy up to enormous size, build a few space siege mortars in near Earth orbit, et voila, Mitsubishi-Krupp-Lockheed-Armstrong-Vickers and Assoc., A.G. enters the space age).

Then there's the UN-sponsored initiative to have everyone that's anyone in space build an asteroid tracking network preparatory to building the neat toys that can obliterate them (they probably already have those toys folks). It's a nifty way to present a united front, on matters of defense... and....well, diplomacy. As the by-now well-known Von Braun/Rosin Affidavit "timetable" has it: first Communists, then terrorists, then nations of concern, then asteroids, and finally ETs. We're already well into "asteroid", and, has anyone been noticing, the spike of movies and tv shows having to do with extraterrestrial invasions and threats lately, or is it just me?

See you on the flip side.