In the first half, William Stickevers, who specializes in archetypal, financial, and geopolitical astrology, talked about major planetary alignments coming in 2020 and what they mean to the economy, politics, and the world. The Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto alignment converges around mid-January and will remain in this configuration until 2022. In March of 2020, there will be a quadruple convergence, with Mars joining the other three planets and "what we're really witnessing here," he remarked, "is the convergence of titanic collective forces on the world stage." This upcoming period, he continued, is similar to the dynamics of the late 1930s, relating to gaps in wealth across the planet, and banks having more and more difficulty in preventing an economic downturn.

The other big thing Stickevers sees coming with the alignment is the rising power of China challenging the dominance of the United States. Such a conflict between ascendant and ruling powers is known as the "Thucydides Trap," and often culminates in war. He also suggested that there'll be a rise in Black Swan events-- highly improbable occurrences that become possible at particular periods in history and often play out in unexpected ways. The potential impeachment of Donald Trump is one such event, but he predicted that blowback, should the impeachment process move forward, would actually strengthen Trump as a candidate in 2020. Further, Stickevers believes a solar eclipse later this year on December 26th could trigger a significant market reconfiguration. During the last hour, he provided psychic consultations for callers.

-------------------------

Chandra Wickramasinghe, Ph.D., is the director of the Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, and a professor of applied mathematics and astronomy. In the latter half, he argued that panspermia-- the seeding of life on Earth by viruses arriving via comets and interstellar dust, built-up life as we know it. In contrast to Carl Sagan's earlier claims, "now we know that the galaxy is chockablock with organic molecules," he cited, and that life on Earth began about a billion years after the planet formed. He suggested that at this early juncture, the so-called "primordial soup" did not exist on Earth-- the planet was simply a cauldron of boiling elements. But then, in a kind of "cosmic miracle," comets began depositing materials containing simple life forms such as single-celled bacteria, and this spurred evolution, and thus all life on our planet stems from such extraterrestrial sources.

Exoplanets, first discovered in 1995, now number in the thousands, and based on estimates that there are 100 billion suns in our galaxy, there may be around 100 billion Earth-like planets here in the Milky Way, he reported. Within our solar system, the Earth travels through the galaxy in a vast cycle that takes 240 million years, "and in that time scale...[we are] exposed to that huge legacy of cosmic life that is distributed throughout...our Milky Way," he said, and in this way, our galaxy becomes a thoroughly mixed system with a connected biosphere.

News segment guests: Ty Bollinger, Lauren Weinstein