The archaeology of the future: Thoughts on December’s anti-Leo Jupiter-Saturn conjunction

On December 21 2020 there is a conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn, in the first degree of Aquarius. This means that we’re about to enter a period of time, lasting 20 years, when the sign Aquarius is going to reign supreme. We already have a feel of this conjunction, as Jupiter and Saturn move closer together, as Saturn flits between late Capricorn and early Aquarius. But it won’t be until the end of the year that we get the full blast.

The author and futurologist H.G. Wells made a connection between archaeology and predicting the future. One thinks of archaeology as being the understanding of long-dead civilizations through unearthing their relics. But maybe it works both ways. We can see the relics of the future in the present day. If we understand these relics, and put them together into a wider picture, we can look ahead, years, decades, even centuries.

But for now I am only looking ahead twenty years. And I don’t think you need any special astrological or mystical skills to think about what is going to happen next. Look at what is happening right now, as the world languishes in lock down:

The internet is achieving its full potential. People are running their lives online. Socializing, shopping and learning, with personal contacts kept to a minimum. The decline of the celebrity. In the age of COVID-19 the heroes are the people working in essential services, not sports stars and the Kardashians. Government is rampant, even in the United States. People are looking to their governments for salvation.

All this is happening before the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. The conjunction itself will actualize the trends. If we want to understand the conjunction, we need to think of the sign it takes place in. Aquarius, the sign that is opposite Leo. It is anti-Leo.

What’s the sign Leo about? Me, the centre of the universe. Look at me, look at how wonderful I am. Aquarius is everything that Leo is not.

Let’s now look back at the last Jupiter-Saturn cycle, that started in May 2000, with a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in late Taurus. I remember the Summer of 2000. In the UK, it was launch of Big Brother, when Reality TV became mainstream. People had cell phones, but they were for making telephone calls and sending text messages. We could therefore see the seeds of a trend.

Jump ten years to 2010, and we are halfway through the Jupiter-Saturn cycle. This is the Full Moon stage of the cycle, where we start to see the full picture. Phones are becoming smart. Social media is taking off. Reality TV is everywhere. We all have the potential of being a star. As we move beyond 2010, the image of the new decade becomes a prostitute preening in front of her cell phone and success is measured by Instagram likes and Youtube followers.

But we are now transitioning into a twenty year period where the individual is going to be less important. Twenty years of Aquarius, twenty years of anti-Leo. Celebrity for celebrity’s sake will be hard to achieve, and the collective will become more important than the individual.

This was of course already happening, but in a way that most of us could probably ignore. A bit like the internet in the late 1990s. From 2010 one of the big trends in technology was big data, with its concept that you can predict individual behavior from collective datasets. From the end of 2020 onwards we need to accept that most of us are going to be statistics, that our individuality doesn’t matter any more.

Aquarius has a clear association with technology. This makes sense. It is anti-Leo. The individual against the machine. Over the next twenty years articifical intelligence will start reaching its full potential, and we’ll see AI control our world in the same way that the internet controls it now. This absolutely requires governments to manage every aspect of the economy, because otherwise AI will lead to mass unemployment.

Talking about the economy, let’s think back to 1990. This was the halfway stage of the 1980 to 2000 Jupiter-Saturn cycle. This was the time when the internet started to make its presence felt. Jump forward to the the current cycle, and the halfway year was 2010. One thing that started in this year was Bitcoin. No-one knows where Bitcoin and the cryptocurrencies are going, especially as the bottom has fallen out of the crypto market. Like it fell out of the NASDAQ, with the dot com collapse in 2000. Yet many internet companies roared back, and many cryptocurrencies will do the same.

Crytpocurrencies aren’t done. In fact, they haven’t even started. One of the hallmarks of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle that starts at the end of 2020 will be an explosion in the adoption of cryptocurrencies. They are something that is high-tech and very Aquarian, and in the first few years of the new decade we are likely to see cryptos hitting new highs. That doesn’t mean that Bitcoin will remain the top dog. It could be something else… Ethereum, Litecoin, NANO, Ripple, IOTA, or something that is still being developed. This means that one of the main features of the next twenty years will be a desperate attempt by all-embracing governments to control the monetary system. It is a battle they probably can’t win.