At an altitude of four hundred miles, the vacuum of space provides a completely frictionless path for Earth observation satellites. We decided to fill this path with high-yield kinetic weapons on Saturday. My team measured the onset of a new global arms race. We used a sample size of three orbital battle stations. The results were completely mundane.
We established a control group of nations without space lasers pointed at them. Then we compared them to Russia and China. The data shows a strong correlation between our new weapons and the end of human civilization. A space weapon is a metal tube that drops fire from the sky until everyone is dead. We found this outcome to be likely, with a p-value of less than point zero five.
The US secretary of the air force, Troy Meink, confirmed the deployment with a heavy sigh. He told reporters the destruction of the planet is tracking exactly to our baseline models.
"We have three active death rays on orbit," Meink said. "I have to write a whole report about it, which is a real pain."
We must be careful not to draw absolute conclusions about the impending apocalypse. However, the data suggests we will all burn by the weekend.
