My name is Mike McElwain and I’m the online editor of the Steubenville Herald-Star. I want to do an update story and include you and others from the class who were involved in this project.

I hope to go into the surrounding schools and have teachers ask the question again for historical reasons and then publish today’s answers.

If you can, go to the Herald-Star’s website, click on “Contact Us” then click on “Contact Us” again to get the list of email addresses.

Look for my name under “Newsroom” and that is my work email address. Sometimes email addresses get removed from posts such as this.

If anyone participated in the project back in 1977, please feel free to contact me as well.

Thanks,

- Mike

As for culture, it meant to me then pretty much the same as it does now. Everything from art and literature to music and fashion to the societal mindset as a whole (although I doubt I used the term “societal mindset” at that age. LOL). I saw us moving away from a society looking out for each other. There were still a lot of folks with community pride then…not so much of the ME ME ME types as today. I’m not saying either is right or wrong, just different.

We also grew up under the real threat of nuclear war. None of us ever really talked about much…but we were always aware of it. I remember the drills in school. On the rare occasions we did talk about it, we would try to guess who woul survive and who wouln’t.

My girlfriend is much younger than I am (only 31) and there are times that I am reminded that her childhood was a different time than mine. Not really a large number of years but a large number of things had changed. We didn’t have computers in school until maybe junior or senior year…and those were TRS80s! LOL

I hope that the kids today get to experience something like this – being able to look back and see something in print that we said. It seems like no big deal nowadays…but when I think back to 1977, so much has changed. I can’t wait to see what the next 35 years bring!

What I would really like to know is how many of these young dreamers grew up to be Limbaugh conservatives who supported the Iraq war, howled in indignation about Solyndra, bash EVs as “Obamamobiles,” rabidly support fossil fuel industries and practices like fracking, moan about “the good old days” without computers, and decry space exploration as a waste of money?

A lot of these predictions simply have their timing off. Pocket Computers came of age as smartphones closer to 2010 rather than 2000. Rooftop solar panels are slowly becoming more common in recent years. Electric cars such as the Volt and Tesla Model S are just now gaining a bit of steam (Volts in particular are definately inching closer to becoming almost “common” here in Northeast Ohio).

As for robotics, well we don’t have Rosie yet but robots are common if you know where to look for them. Industrial robots are well established and are becoming lower priced and more intelligent, UAVs are a major technology on the world stage and it appears that civilian versions are on the way.
Robots are being either currently used or close to being available for use in surgery, milking, agriculture, bomb disposal, fire fighting, disaster response, military reconaissance, ocean surveilence, lifeguard duty (EMILY), etc. If you follow news in the robotic industry, the consensus is that a ‘tipping point” is approaching.

As always, the predictions about space travel are always the most depressing, for me. It’s probably because we were on the right track, with the first moon landing less than a decade after the first manned flight and all, and the total failure of Congress to keep us on track. Here’s to hoping that the rise of private spaceflight companies like SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Mars One, Virgin Galactic, and co. will step up and realize the dream.