I was asked this morning what I thought the square with Uranus and Pluto would mean for the world starting in 2012 and going on until 2015. Based on human behavior as I see it reported in the mainstream media, blogs, and fringe media, I am willing to predict a global depression. The thing about naming a depression is that it usually takes a few years in to actually get the human denial machine to own up to it. When the global depression is written about one day in the future, the dates may reach as far back as 2007, the beginning of the Great Recession. Actually, for history buffs, the original Great Depression worldwide and in the US occurred from 1873 to 1896. This time period was renamed the Long Depression after the 1930s Depression earned the moniker the Great Depression. Maybe this one will be the Greatest Depression or the Really Great Depression.
We have a perfect storm brewing, mainly due to the collusion of population growth by way of non-renewable resources that we are treating as if they are renewable. I have yet to find even the staunchest conservative who would claim that more oil is being created at the same time and/or rate we are consuming it. Basically the argument boils down to how much oil do we have left and is it enough time for human ingenuity to pull our assess out of the fire when we use up all the non-renewable resources (including not only oil, but natural gas and uranium as well). You see, we do actually live on a planet with infinite resource, we just can't live the American/European lifestyle on a purely solar/wind/water energy plan. And even those plans require using some non-renewable resources to help in the capture of the energy. When religious texts say the meek will inherit the Earth, they must be predicting the time when non-renewable energy reserves are gone and the entitled people who live on them find they really can't manage to stay alive; they are not hardy enough to live without their petroleum based medicines or wise enough to return to living off the land (especially suburbia). I'll probably be one of the entitled to bite the dust, truthfully.
Hence, the Dark Ages prove one vital message for humanity ... we can go "backwards." 2012 to 2015 will be the spark of the mother of all spiritual forest fires. Oil and other non-renewable resources are part of our spiritual test, one we have failed miserably and will, apparently, continue to fail. Here's how you can learn that we are on the edge of failure; follow the stories about new energy source extraction and you will see it is more costly and more dangerous (deeper wells required, more out of the way places to get to it, more unstable methods to get to it). Eventually it will cost more energy to extract energy and that is the end game.
What makes this kind of prediction a bit more reliable than previous end of world scenarios. Well, we're actually, really reaching the limits of the biosphere for the first time in human history. We have operated with a frontier mentality for so long that we actually believe the planet is a limitless frontier instead of a round ball enclosed by an atmosphere that is like a true boundary. Use up all the non-renewable resources,that took millions of years to produce, in less than 50,000 years, and most aggressively in less than 5,000 years, and exponentially grow the population and you can see that we are actually reaching the upper limits of what the planet can sustain. You can not expect good things to happen when you treat a limited environment like an unlimited one. Let me use a basic logic problem to illustrate my point:
Let's say you have a container filled with a certain amount of water that constantly renews itself. An organism comes long an sustains itself by consuming the water. Luckily the consumption of the water at a certain level does not break the renewal process. So, to begin with, the new organism consumes and discovers there is plenty left over but never studies the closed system because the organism is NOT LARGE ENOUGH to see that system is actually closed and has a limit. So the organism consumes and expands AS IF the system expands with it or has no limits. But in truth, there is an optimum point when consumption will actually damage the renewal point and essentially break the system. That's humanities path at the moment. And if people, generally, are more worried about the future, globally speaking, I would argue that people quietly, in some deep subconscious recess, are generally realizing that we are hitting the limits of the system, especially the non-renewable energy limits. And more to the point, deep down, these same people know that truly renewable resources cannot ever REPLACE the lifestyle created by the non-renewable sources, much in the same way people considering divorce know that they will take a lifestyle hit if they have to go live on one income or have to start earning enough to maintain separate residences.
In the end, the Uranus/Pluto square is not about a new invention to "keep the status quo" but a globally enforced behavior change that we could consciously choose, but most likely will not. Greed, short sightedness, and an unwillingness to manage human population will lead to the mother of all bubble bursts. I know this is not uplifting stuff and truthfully, I just wanted to get it out. And let me tell you, I would be more than happy to somehow be "proven wrong," but I bet the horses I see and watch run. What I see is massive debt and insolvency that can only come with fiat currency and interest rates because we went off a natural resource standard (gold, which would have forced us to live within a certain limit), accelerated consumption of non-renewable resources, continuing population growth until outside pressure exerts enough force (via starvation, disease, war between heavily military nations for remaining non-renewable resources, unnatural disasters involving the pursuit of non-renewable resources) to reign it in.
Will the world actually end, no. Will humanity, as a whole, have to cut back, as in the number of human beings on the planet, yes. That will not be fun and it will be the end of the world for a lot people; their end. It will be messy for the world, painfully so. But deep down, I don't think we have to go the unthinking route, the denial, pretend it won't happen route. I think we can make conscious choices to make a better future, I just think its going to take the rough and tumble, dark side of Uranus/Pluto to get us woken up on a large enough scale to make the necessary changes.
What makes this kind of prediction a bit more reliable than previous end of world scenarios. Well, we're actually, really reaching the limits of the biosphere for the first time in human history. We have operated with a frontier mentality for so long that we actually believe the planet is a limitless frontier instead of a round ball enclosed by an atmosphere that is like a true boundary. Use up all the non-renewable resources,that took millions of years to produce, in less than 50,000 years, and most aggressively in less than 5,000 years, and exponentially grow the population and you can see that we are actually reaching the upper limits of what the planet can sustain. You can not expect good things to happen when you treat a limited environment like an unlimited one. Let me use a basic logic problem to illustrate my point:
Let's say you have a container filled with a certain amount of water that constantly renews itself. An organism comes long an sustains itself by consuming the water. Luckily the consumption of the water at a certain level does not break the renewal process. So, to begin with, the new organism consumes and discovers there is plenty left over but never studies the closed system because the organism is NOT LARGE ENOUGH to see that system is actually closed and has a limit. So the organism consumes and expands AS IF the system expands with it or has no limits. But in truth, there is an optimum point when consumption will actually damage the renewal point and essentially break the system. That's humanities path at the moment. And if people, generally, are more worried about the future, globally speaking, I would argue that people quietly, in some deep subconscious recess, are generally realizing that we are hitting the limits of the system, especially the non-renewable energy limits. And more to the point, deep down, these same people know that truly renewable resources cannot ever REPLACE the lifestyle created by the non-renewable sources, much in the same way people considering divorce know that they will take a lifestyle hit if they have to go live on one income or have to start earning enough to maintain separate residences.
In the end, the Uranus/Pluto square is not about a new invention to "keep the status quo" but a globally enforced behavior change that we could consciously choose, but most likely will not. Greed, short sightedness, and an unwillingness to manage human population will lead to the mother of all bubble bursts. I know this is not uplifting stuff and truthfully, I just wanted to get it out. And let me tell you, I would be more than happy to somehow be "proven wrong," but I bet the horses I see and watch run. What I see is massive debt and insolvency that can only come with fiat currency and interest rates because we went off a natural resource standard (gold, which would have forced us to live within a certain limit), accelerated consumption of non-renewable resources, continuing population growth until outside pressure exerts enough force (via starvation, disease, war between heavily military nations for remaining non-renewable resources, unnatural disasters involving the pursuit of non-renewable resources) to reign it in.
Will the world actually end, no. Will humanity, as a whole, have to cut back, as in the number of human beings on the planet, yes. That will not be fun and it will be the end of the world for a lot people; their end. It will be messy for the world, painfully so. But deep down, I don't think we have to go the unthinking route, the denial, pretend it won't happen route. I think we can make conscious choices to make a better future, I just think its going to take the rough and tumble, dark side of Uranus/Pluto to get us woken up on a large enough scale to make the necessary changes.
