Doomsday!
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2018 8:59 am
I find it interesting to look back at projections by scientists in earlier decades and to remember how they seemed and sounded at the time. The following is a Garth Allen article excerpt from the February 1961 issue of American Astrology. It anticipates not so much the exact problems we are facing today as the general sense of emergency around it. We may have dodged this specific bullet with a lot of attention, which means we can dodge other bullets if we actually put our collective minds to it. I do find it disturbing that, this late in the game, the long-term impact of pollution on climate wasn't anticipated - that recognition was at least a decade away.
I find it thought-provoking.
I find it thought-provoking.
You folks with planetary tables enabling you to computer ephemerides far in advance should work out the celestial configuration for the third decade of the 21st century, just to see whether there will be anything unusual taking place around that time. Through rigorous mathematics laced with gigantic ifs, the exact year in question is 2026 A.D. This is the year that the present rate of population increases in the world will make its breakthrough into infinity - barring global epidemics or atomic wars.
So states Dr. von Foerster, physicist of the University of Illinois, in the weekly journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, surely the biggest brain-trust on our planet. Even a school child or anybody lacking know-how in advanced math can appreciate that this forecast of doom is no fiction, no mere calamity-howling. Simply plot the population figures of the past and present on a piece of paper and connect the points with a curve and it does indeed shoot straight up into infinity about 6 or 7 decades from now [1961].
What is fiction, however, is that the disaster which an overpopulated world must face is mass starvation. Food technology is already so advanced that we rest assured our grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be pressed to death by each other before beri-beri gets the best of them. Another danger is planetary air pollution that has gotten so bad as to be beyond control, resulting in global asphyxiation.
The disaster can take any of many possible forms, but disaster there will be if the population explosion is not curbed within our own lifetimes. Determining the date of doomsday for the human race would surely be an interesting challenge in astrological deduction. Astrologers who specialize in the study of cycles have a most fascinating problem to tackle and we'll look forward to hearing their views.