photography to the first animated feature length films and the proliferation of network television, Uranus and Neptune have been in significant aspect to each other. 8 With these strong correlations, it was an intuitive guess that new advances in the way we image our world was about to be born under the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, but few were those that foresaw how all-pervasive these changes would be.
In 1990, two computer enthusiasts from Ann Arbor, Michigan finalized the first version of a small program called "Photoshop" and the era of digital image manipulation was born. 9 With Photoshop and programs like it, "real" photographs could be combined with objects synthesized on a home computer, and industries from print to advertising were revolutionized. More importantly, however, the way we perceived information and the way images appeared—on television, on book covers, in print ads, on music label art—looked radically different then they way things appeared just a few years prior to the start of the 1990's.
As the world was re-inventing it's own image through the digital revolution, we were exponentially expanding the boundaries of the known universe through pictures. Launched in the same year as Photoshop, the Hubble telescope took thousands of pictures of the cosmos, from images of the planets in our solar system to supernovae light years away. Not since the beginning of the Copernican Revolution has any event so changed our understanding of the universe as the Hubble Space Telescope. Not only has Hubble renewed a sense of awe and reverence for the mystery of creation, but it has also radically improved and refined our understanding of cosmology and the physical dynamics of deep space.
If Uranus's higher intellectual acuity has allowed humanity to transcend the limitations of gravity to explore deep space, Uranus's mental fire has also bestowed an almost godlike power of manipulating, altering, or otherwise improving upon our conditions here on earth. Nowhere can this be observed so powerfully than in the sweeping advances in genetic engineering in the last several years. Again, in 1990, the U.S. Department of Energy helped initiate the human genome project, an international effort to map the hundreds of thousands of genes that comprise the human genome. Once completed early this decade, the potential benefits of the project will be enormous, from accurate prognosis of disease to tremendous advances in forensics. However, the Uranus-Neptune conjunction was not without it's practical application of genetic engineering as well. Genetically modified foods began to enter the marketplace and the first patients began to successfully receive the benefits of gene therapy. Nevertheless, the real showstopper on the genetics front was the announcement of Dolly the sheep in 1997, the first successfully cloned mammal. Currently healthy and able to produce offspring, Dolly takes us significantly closer to the reality of human cloning and the ethical and moral implications that it entails.
If cloning took us into the not-so-distant future and Hubble took us to the outer regions of space, it was the Internet and World Wide Web that had the most revolutionizing, dramatic impact on daily life. An infrastructure that had existed in potential since the late 1960's, the Internet finally caught fire, and, in typical Uranian fashion, exploded onto the economic and cultural scene, creating a not-so-minor mania for several years during the mid-to-late 1990's. Over the course of a decade, the number of active users on the Internet nearly doubled every year and by the end of the century, nearly half a billion people were using the Internet regularly. The rise in number of websites during the same period was even more remarkable. No technology has mutated so quickly and effected so many facets of life. From commerce, communication and education, no area of daily living remained untouched. The speed of its growth, its effects on the pace of life, and the rapidity of information exchange all suggest that the Internet is the expression of Uranus's need for speed, stimulation, and excitation. Yet the quasi-religious reverence that some people reserved for the Internet and its ability to shrink the boundaries of the world also suggest the very Neptunian dimensions of the technology as well. The allegations from some pundits that a veritable Indra's Net was born through the web suggests that the Internet is a cosmic lattice work, a fabric that eradicated the illusion of autonomy and independence in favor of interdependence and connectivity.
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