emergency alert trial from government (yes I know it’s been spoken about for years)
A much delayed government IT project. Nothing unusual. It's a cost-saving system to replace expensive to maintain earlier alert systems, e.g. flood sirens.
a few asteroids flying “close” and reported in press
Asteroids have been doing close passes for thousands of years. Scary stories sell papers/get viewers. The quality of scientific journalism in the popular press is appalling - which is tragic given the widespread scientific illiteracy of the public.
A few solar/planet events… eg holes in sun creating solar winds, northern lights being so far down south, weird planetary alignments
Solarstorms and big aurora displays are normal for a building solar cycle. It's expected. The planets align according to their orbits. No coincidence or conspiracy.
nasa being able to defect the path of an asteroid in the last 6 months
The deflection was tiny. Space scientists are always hitting things with other things to see what happens. Intercepting fast moving asteroids isn't easy though, and they were waiting for one with the right orbit.
the constant threat of nuclear war
Has been constant since 1945, but actually feels less likely today than it did in the 80s. But I can fully understand why it feels so new to young people today.
chatter a few months ago about weird spy balloons and possibility of aliens?!
It turns out that China (and others) had been sending these over for many years, and under the Trump administration they decided not to tell people about them even though they were detected. The Japanese launched incendiary bomb balloons against the USA during WW2. It's nothing new.
Alien conspiracy theories are even older than the threat of nuclear war. There is no accounting for what someone somewhere is prepared to believe.
The biggest change in the last twenty years is the internet and how quickly conspiracies, fake news, and whatever-the-duck we're supposed to describe the Q lunacy as, can spread throughout the population.