A Portent of Things to Come Through the Eyes of Max Weber, George Orwell, Elon Musk, Rachel Carson, and Extrapolated Facts of Today

Part One:  The shape of Tomorrow World

There will be flying cars and autonomous self-driving trucks in transportation. Traffic will be regulated by government and staggered to reduce congestion in places like Los Angeles.

In medicine human limbs, organs and teeth are grown in the lab to replace broken and diseased ones. Replacements will also be cybernetic giving the blind the eyesight of an eagle or the crippled the ability to run sixty miles per hour.

Robots serve humans beck and call.   Mail and packages will be delivered exclusively by drones.

There will be perhaps almost ten billion people on the planet.  An endless well of cameras and other devices monitor and shadow their every movement.  Even now we all have our identity cards.  Transgressions will be reported to computer court.

In penology criminals’ brains are reprogrammed to eliminate their violent tendencies and predatory methods.  Jails have become reprogramming centers.

Much of the world will be vegetarian.  Meat is expensive to produce.  Its taste and texture will have been reproduced exactly in vegetable form.

The moon, a mere quarter million miles away, has been colonized.  Supply rockets routinely shuttle back and forth from earth.  Minerals are extracted from its surface.

 

Part Two:  Social Structures

In the world of 2050, there will be vast bureaucratization. *  This rapid increase really began in the New Deal programs of the 1930s which were designed to combat the Great Depression.

Max Weber, one of the founders of sociology, realized the problems inherent in a bureaucracy.  ** While it brought stability, it could also be dehumanizing, This has come to the fore.  [He was a Taurus with a Libra Moon and Sagittarius rising.]

Government’s response to societal and economic problems will be more monitoring and control, more Big Brother.***   The ever-tightening grip does not dissipate after a crisis.  It becomes institutionalized and tighter.  Control is a form of power.

By 2050 the vast bureaucracies we see in public education, the legal system (courts and jails), military, and corporations have become all encompassing.

In the future workers may have computer chips implanted in their brains.  They will then be monitored for productivity, compliance, and excessive emotionality.  In the novel 1984 George Orwell said, “Power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing.”

Orwell had a stellium in Cancer (Sun, Moon, and Neptune) all bound closely together in the 9^th House.  Mercury was in Gemini and trine to both Mars in Libra and Saturn in Aquarius. His Mars in trine to Saturn and above stellium may well have given him an instinctive understanding about those who seek power. He had also seen the rise of fascism in the 1930s. In his novel people are given what they want:  a simple, unthinking fully controlled life.   Orwell’s Ascendant was in a sign with high control needs—Scorpio.

 

Part Three:  Advertising, Media, and Silicon Valley

In tomorrow’s milieu people will be able to interact with campaign ads and product advertisements and immediately express their approbation or disapprobation.  They could immediately check for accuracy and truth of content if freedom is maintained.  Or if Big Brother is in control, they will be told what they wish to hear in a vast dystopian cyber world.  Orwell said, “The best books are those that tell you what you knew already.”

Companies like Facebook and Twitter**** will dominate. They will create imaginary relationships and friends.  Illusory relationships foster a benign fellowship.  All is well.  Or punditry will be monitored with opinions and propaganda labelled as such.

The rich will continue to have more advantages than the rest.  They will continue to exert control and influence.

 

Part Four:  Will the problems of today be solved by 2050?

The big problems of today are these:  drought (global warming) and the concomitant loss of arable and coastal land, overpopulation, and the vast diminution of animal and sea life.

In August of 2022 two-thirds of Europe was under a drought warning.  The Rhine River, Europe’s second largest, has sunk dramatically.

In the U.S. Lakes Mead and Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs, were at historic low levels.  The San Joaquin Valley in Central California is the nation’s breadbasket.  Agricultural yields are expected to diminish in the future.  Growers depleted subterranean water by drawing too heavily from wells.  They did this because of a long drought with little rain enhancing the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

In China the Yangtze River, the world’s third largest, has been withering away. The river basin is home to 450 million people and one third of China’s crops.

Much of the world’s population lives on the coast.  By 2050 it has been forced to relocate inland because of rising sea levels.  Cities have experienced ocean flooding.

In the world of tomorrow, there will be less arable land and less water for agriculture.  Desalinization plants are expensive but may pose a partial solution.  Drought resistant crops are another. Perhaps man will be able to control climate and make it rain at will.  Fruits and vegetables will be grown without soil.

Rachel Carson, a Gemini and marine biologist, contributed much to the betterment of humanity. Her book, Silent Spring, supercharged the environmental movement and led to the banning of some pesticides, notably DDT.  She also wrote a bestseller about the ocean entitled The Sea Around Us. (Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia) Carson had the Moon in Sagittarius with Pisces rising.  Prominent features in her natal chart included a Mars Uranus conjunction in Capricorn and a Jupiter Neptune one in Cancer.

Bird populations have dropped 29% since 1970.  This signifies a loss of almost three billion birds in fifty-two years.  There has also been a 68% decline in wildlife because of deforestation and loss of habitat.  4,000 species of vertebrates were tracked.  [Living Planet Index, www.trtworld.com/life]

“The oceans are the engines and origins of all life, and they are under threat.” (www.conservation.org/stories/ocean-pollution)  “A new report from the World Wildlife Fund indicates a nearly 50% decline In marine life populations between 1970 and 2012.”  (www.cnn.com)  There has been overfishing.  Tuna and mackerel populations have declined by 75%.  (Ibid)

Each year about 26 billion pounds of plastic are dumped into the ocean.  There are now five big garbage patches in the ocean.  The biggest covers an area twice the size of Texas and contains 1.8 trillion pieces of trash.

People have created dead zones in the oceans.  Manure and fertilizer from agricultural activity are washed into the sea.  They feed the growth of algae.  The area becomes hypoxic.  There is little oxygen.  Marine life cannot survive.  (https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/dead-zone) Dead zones occur along coasts.  There is one in the Gulf of Mexico which is 7,776 square miles long.  (ibid)

By 2050 advances in genetics and biology have permitted mankind to reproduce and replicate animal and sea life populations in a large way.  Or they have become extinct like the dodo bird or nearly so like bison and tuna, particularly when deemed nonessential by Big Brother.

 

Conclusion

Humanity seems to be at a crossroads. Will technological advances save it from problems, many of its own making, or will it succumb and at least partially die out?   Population is growing exponentially.  At the end of the Black Death in 1350, there were about 370,000,000 people in the world. There were roughly 600 million to a billion in the 1800s.  There were two billion people in 1927, and another billion added to that in 1960.  That 1927 number more than doubled to 5 billion in 1987.  Today there are around 8 billion people inhabiting the planet.  The earth does not have the resources to support an ever-growing humanity.  Moreover, man has not been a careful steward of those resources but has often acted in a short-sided, greedy way resulting in their diminution.

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*Bureaucracies are simply a top-down hierarchy with one individual at the apex in a triangle shaped structure.  Compliance and rigid application of rules are expected from workers.  They’re nothing new and have existed before the time of the Egyptians and their pyramids.

**Max Weber (April 21, 1864- June 14, 1920) “was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist and one of the most important theorists of modern Western society.”  (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) He stated a bureaucracy had nine characteristics.

***The federal government largely took control of the mortgage market after it collapsed in 2007-2008. The Great Recession was caused by poor oversight which permitted greedy bankers to make mortgage loans to people who should never have qualified.  Paid for processing the loans, banks passed them on to Wall Street where they were bundled and sold. In the world of 2050, there will be no paper currency or metal coins.  There will only be cyber currency.

**** Elon Musk is a Cancer with a Virgo Moon.  Uranus is square to both Sun and Mercury.  Mars is in Aquarius. He has been touted as a genius.  His attire is futuristic.  He is good at creating an image.  Elon’s manner with his employees is reportedly brusque and erratic.  This is suggested by the Uranus aspects which mar his talent and ability.   He seems to lack empathy and compassion unlike Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder who apologized to Twitter employees for going big too fast.  Musk’s original home life was problematic, and he said his father was abusive.  He seems to overemphasize technology.  Elon’s expertise appears limited to computers, coding, cars, artificial intelligence, satellites, and rocketry.   He liked reading science fiction as a child.