We’re currently at the peak of the Jupiter Uranus cycle that began in 2010. The opposition alignment began last year and runs until 2018, and you can discover what has happened so far here. In this post, we’ll have a closer look at the last two cycles to get a feel for how things tend to play out during these times.

To recap, the Jupiter Uranus cycle correlates with times when we see more political and social rebellions and protests, revolutions demanding freedom and equality, breakthroughs and discoveries in science, innovations in technology, and new beginnings and awakenings in many areas.

The most important synchronicities tend to happen at the conjunctions and oppositions, but significant events can also occur at the squares, sextiles and trines. However, with the Jupiter Uranus cycle, if you include all the alignments, you end up with almost no gaps, as you can see in the table below:

Aspect	Exact Alignments
Conjunction	February 1997
Sextile	April 1999
Square	May 2000
Trine	June 2001
Opposition	August 2003
Trine	Nov 2005; May 2006; Aug 2006
Square	Jan 2007; May 2007; Oct 2007
Sextile	Mar-Apr 2008; May 2008; Nov 2008
Current Cycle
Conjunction	June 2010; Sept 2010; Jan 2011
Sextile	Jul 2012; Feb 2013; Mar 2013
Square	Aug 2013; Feb 2014; April 2014
Trine	Sept 2014; Feb-Mar 2015; Jun 2015
Opposition	Dec 2016; Feb-Mar 2017; Sept-Oct 2017
Trine	December 2019
Square	January 2021
Sextile	February 2022
Next Cycle
Conjunction	April 2024

Remember that each period of alignment has an orb of influence that extends out before and after the exact aspects are formed. So when the alignments occur three times within a cycle, as we see from 2005 to 2017, each period practically runs right into the next. This means it’s very easy to find sync points during these times. But the most significant events will still tend to fall on the conjunctions, squares and oppositions.

A quick example: Barack Obama won the US election during the sextile alignment in November 2008. As the first black president, it’s surprising that this radical change didn’t occur on a major sync point. You would expect it to fall at the start or peak of a cycle, or at least at a square. However, the sextile shows that it was an easy win, and that the times were ready for him. But perhaps it also reflects the fact that his presidency wasn’t that revolutionary.

It was more or less business as usual in terms of the neoliberal agenda seen under the previous president. Racial tensions and violence against black people continued as before. Perhaps it wasn’t as big a breakthrough as we believed at the time. When you compare it to the election of Trump, the differences become obvious. Donald Trump was elected during the current peak of the cycle, signalling a major change in direction, and he’s already causing much larger ructions.

Before we dig into the details on the cycles, it’s important to note that these alignments don’t make things happen. You see breakthroughs and innovations and revolutions happening at others times, but the really significant ones are more likely to happen during a Jupiter Uranus alignment. A major sync point between Jupiter and Uranus increases the probability of these events. They’re possible at any time, but more probable during these times.

Politics

The previous cycle began in 1997 with pro-democracy protests in Burma, and mass strikes in South Korea. In the UK, Labour won the general election ending 18 years of Tory rule and bringing Tony Blair to prominence (there’s always a dark side to these alignments!). At the peak of this cycle in 2003 Scotland voted to establish a devolved parliament within the UK, and the calls for total independence have only got louder since the Brexit vote last year.

The cycle came to a close with the sextile and Obama’s election to the White House, as we’ve already mentioned. He took office amid the global financial crisis and the recession that followed, although these events are part of the Saturn Pluto and the Uranus Pluto cycles, which we’ll look at another time.

The current cycle kicked off in 2010 with violent protests around the world, including the anti-government protests in Thailand, protests in Greece against the austerity measures being introduced in Europe, and the Arab Spring that started in Tunisia and then spread throughout the Middle East.

In the UK, Labour lost the general election, largely because of Blair’s complicity in the Bush regime’s illegal approach to starting wars. But it was a hung parliament, so the UK got its first coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, which didn’t work out well for the latter. By the end of 2010, the streets were full of angry students protesting against the imposition of tuition fees, and the Lib Dems have never recovered.

In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi was released after 21 years of house arrest. While in the US, the Obamacare bill was signed into law, and ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ was repealed, the policy that had prevented openly gay people from serving in the US military.

Throughout 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of secret documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus other sensitive information, including the diplomatic cables leaked by Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley). She was arrested in May 2010 and sentenced to a 35-year term. Now this cycle is at a peak, Obama commuted her sentence and she’ll be released in May this year.

More classified information was revealed during the following sextile alignment in 2013 when Edward Snowdon disclosed details of the mass surveillance being done by the NSA, and he ended up escaping to Russia.

Breakthroughs in Science

The previous cycle began with the successful cloning of a sheep called Dolly in 1997. By the peak in 2003, the first cloned deer and horse were born, and the Human Genome project was finally completed.

At the start of the current cycle in 2010, cloned meat was eaten for the first time in the UK, and scientists in the US created a fully functional synthetic living cell, the first artificial life form. There were also breakthroughs in the use of embryonic stem cells for transplants and to treat disease. And we saw the creation of the first human embryo using the DNA of three people. At the following sextile in 2013 scientists created an ear from collagen using a 3D printer, and the journal Nature announced the first cloned human stem cells.

In the world of particle physics, the Large Hadron Collider was opened at CERN just before the start of this cycle in November 2009. But it wasn’t until March 2010 that the first proton beams were smashed into each other, starting a new era of science with a bang. By December 2010, they had managed to trap 38 anti-hydrogen atoms for a sixth of a second. Apparently that’s a big deal, but I don’t know what it means! The Higgs Boson was finally discovered during the sextile and confirmed in March 2013.

Space and Aviation

The conjunction in 2010 saw the first 24-hour flight in a solar powered plane, the Solar Impulse, but the rest of the syncs come from space. Astronomers discovered the first exo-planet within the habitable zone of its star, as well as the most distant object ever found in the universe. NASA revealed that up to a third of the Martian surface was once covered by ocean, and Obama announced plans for NASA to visit an asteroid by 2025 (i.e. the start of the next cycle). The first commercially built and operated spacecraft, SpaceX, was also launched that year.

At the sextile in 2013, astronomers reported that there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized exo-planets in the Milky Way. And at the current opposition, they’ve just found seven Earth-sized planets orbiting one star. I’m not sure what any of this means to us down here, but there’s definitely life out there somewhere.

Later in 2013, during the square alignment, India launched its first Mars Orbiter, and the Chinese spacecraft, Chang’e3, landed on the Moon. The space race is now global. Finally, during the trine alignment in 2014, the Rosetta spacecraft successfully landed on a comet.

Innovations in Technology

At the start of the previous cycle in 1997, General Motors launched their first electric car, and something that would become hugely influential first started: Netflix. In fact, the whole of this cycle saw the inexorable growth of the internet and its infiltration into every part of our lives. The main players of today all started around the same time, during the trine alignment of 2005-06. YouTube first appeared in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006, and both Twitter and Facebook (as a public app) began in 2006.

At the start of this cycle in 2010, the iPad was released and there was a massive boom in the number of iPhones being sold, and smartphones began their takeover. Following the success of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video started as the conjunction ended in February 2011.

Electric cars were made available to the mass market for the first time, and we got the first production-line hydrogen fuelled car. Meanwhile scientists built a 3D printer that made supposedly edible food. Sounds almost as appetising as the cloned meat.

In quantum computing, researchers were able to achieve stability for the first time. There were also breakthroughs in robotics and prosthetics, and the Watson supercomputer beat two humans on the Jeopardy quiz show, the first time an AI had outperformed a mere human.

Throughout the rest of this cycle, there have been continuous breakthroughs in multiple areas, and when I was putting together this summary, it all got a little overwhelming. The sextile alignment in 2013 coincided with the Consumer Electronic Show where many innovations were showcased, including flexible tablet computers, self-driving cars, medical robots, and high-efficiency microchips.

Later in 2013, the square saw the rapid growth of industrial robots in China, and we’re now seeing the impact in the loss of jobs around the world, which is set to get worse as everybody else races to keep up. It’s getting out of hand! What can we expect at the start of the next cycle in 2024? Sentient AI, perhaps? Let’s hope not.

Cultural Breakthroughs

In 1997, J.K. Rowling published the first Harry Potter book in the series, which went on to become a massive phenomenon. Interestingly, she has Jupiter square Uranus in her horoscope. The films based on her books were hugely successful, coming to an end with The Deathly Hallows parts 1 and 2, released in 2010-11 at the start of the next cycle. At the current peak, we’ve just seen the release of the spinoff film, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, so the wizarding world continues to grow and remains popular around the Muggle world.

Another runaway success was the film Titanic, also released in 1997. It won 11 Oscars and was the most expensive movie ever made, becoming the biggest grossing film ever at the box office. That was until it was outdone by another James Cameron epic, Avatar, which came out just before the conjunction in 2010. However, the DVD sales of Avatar broke records in April that year, and the extended version of the film was released in August 2010. James Cameron also has Jupiter conjunct Uranus in his chart.

Another area that has seen massive growth during this time is self-publishing. It used to be the preserve of the vanity presses, but in 2007, during the square alignment, Amazon launched their Kindle Direct Publishing platform and the world of publishing is still reeling from the results.

By the start of this cycle in 2010, Kindle sales had outstripped hardbacks on the Amazon site, and paperbacks followed in January 2011. This meant many authors bypassed the traditional publishing route, and went straight to the readers, often achieving huge levels of success. Three notable authors took advantage of this technology: E.L. James, Andy Weir, and Hugh Howey.

Hugh Howey published the first instalment of his Silo Trilogy, Wool, on Amazon in July 2011, just as the alignment was waning, but he would have been writing it during the conjunction. The rest of the Silo instalments were published through 2011-13, and he sold over a million copies in one five month period. During the sextile alignment in 2012 he signed a print-only publishing deal, being one of the first authors to hang on to their digital rights, and the omnibus edition came out in March 2013 as the sextile came to a close.

E.L. James wrote Fifty Shades of Grey on a fan fiction site during the conjunction in 2010, and self-published the book on Amazon in May 2011 as the alignment faded. The book was picked up for traditional publishing following insane levels of sales and released in April 2012 during the sextile. The film based on the book came out in February 2015 during the trine alignment, and the series continues to be ridiculously popular.

Finally, there’s a similar pattern to the release of The Martian by Andy Weir. He wrote it in 2009, and then published it on his blog during the conjunction in 2010. It was released on Kindle in 2011 and achieved huge sales, and was picked up by Random House in 2014 during the square alignment. The film based on the book came out in October 2015 just after the trine.

The current cycle is at its peak, so during the opposition we can expect more breakthroughs and innovations. Keep your eye on CERN and NASA for more announcements through 2017, and watch out for more upheavals and craziness from the world of politics and espionage. Don’t expect things to quieten down any time soon. More on the opposition here.

For more historical synchronicities read: The Jupiter Uranus Cycle Archetypes & History

Images: Tahrir Square; Dolly; Comet

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