“The stars indicate that you should live every day as though it were your last. Especially this coming Thursday.”

TheOnion.com may ridicule it and scientists may pour scorn, but a 2006 MORI poll showed that some 28 per cent of Britons believe in astrology.  And whether or not you are one of them, some people certainly do well out of the stars.

Dieke Begg, a Battersea based astrologer, charges £90 for a first consultation, and explained how she entered the profession:  “I used to think that people were born with a talent, but it is not true.  I just studied day and night.  You are not born with the knowledge.  You have to study.” 

The Faculty of Astrological Studies, set up in 1948 to “raise the standard of astrological education”, claims that 10,000 people have enrolled on their courses, and Begg is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Astrologers International.  Only those with a recognised qualification can join, and they must agree a seven point code of ethics including a ban on medical, legal or financial advice without appropriate skills.

Begg says most of her customers come to her for direction: “I’ve just done a tape for someone in Suffolk who wants to know whether to buy a house now.  Other people want to know ‘should I marry this person?’ or ‘I’m in a terrible relationship – how can I get out of it?’”

Astrology has its doubters.  A 2003 study of around 2,000 so-called ‘time twins’, children born at about the same time in London, examined their IQs, marital status, skills and jobs.  Researchers found no correlation between human characteristics and the position of celestial bodies used by astrology.

However, Begg defends her profession, saying that astrology is a science based on statistics, and her statistics show that many people are satisfied with her work: “Sometimes people come back within a week or a day, saying how useful it was.”

Recently, people have come to her because they are about to be made redundant, and she warns that some constellations now are the same as in 1066 and 1914.  The omens for next few years do not look good.

Few people know that, since 1994, the UK government has run a programme devoted to ‘futurology’.   The word itself conjures up images of flying cars and teleporters, but Whitehall plays down any such exciting ideas by calling it the Foresight Programme. Trends from the past and present are thrown many years forward, to guess at possible scenarios for the future. 

A civil servant working on the Foresight Programme explains how the government uses it: “What we do is less about predicting the future, but coming up with a range of possible futures the government can plan against.  We look at weak signals today that are below the radar, but might become big issues in the future.  The purpose is to broaden the thinking, rather than narrowing it down to one.”

Departments across government use Foresight as a resource, requesting studies into issues appearing on their horizons; then experts are gathered and scenarios are drawn up.  The topics are hardly trivial: mental development of the UK population, global food and farming, brain science, addiction and drugs.

One of the current investigations, into Britain’s obesity time bomb, is pessimistic about the likelihood of change, finding “a strong feeling that a crisis - for example a dramatic increase in food or fuel prices precipitated by water shortage or climate change - might be the only way of triggering action.”

Another study, completed in 2005, examined what Britain’s infrastructure might be like 50 years later, creating four scenarios to aid thinking about roads, telecommunications, water and energy.

In one scenario, the world has been scarred by a savage energy shock and global economic catastrophe.  Cities are empty, bikes and horses are used for local transport, and people live in “smaller, very close-knit insular communities, in self-sustaining ‘pods’ that generate enough food and power.”

In another scenario, extreme weather finally forces society to slash carbon emissions.  Cars spy on their driver’s environmental performance and reduce speed to minimise emissions, and “a tough national surveillance system ensures that people travel only if they have sufficient carbon ‘points’.” 

But what effect has all this modelling had in the real world?  There are few signs of concrete changes on the ground, but plenty of evidence that departments, business and international organisations have referenced this work when conducting their own reviews, studies and models.

And what about those flying cars?  A Whitehall official was quick to translate this exciting possibility into bureaucratic language.  According to the civil servant, they are a “possible future”, and the role of futures research would be to consider what conditions could bring flying cars about, and what their effect would be.