A look at how Eastern Iowa is faring in the future

Note: This was my column in the Sunday, Dec. 19, Gazette newspaper. You can read this kind of wisdom earlier at the digital version of the newspaper. There's a subscription fee but it is small. Here's the link.

In some ways it doesn't seem that long ago that we were preparing for the new millennium. The 21

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Century was the future. We had the chance to be propelled into that future with wonder, even while we feared that our computers would collapse and take down with them every device upon which we depended.

Surely better days would be ahead, we thought, never suspecting that airplanes used as missiles in New York City and Washington, D.C., and turned into rubble in a field in Pennsylvania would define the new century's first decade.

The Gazette set out in December 1999 to find out how curious we were about this new set of 100 years. Science will help us cure diseases such as HIV, cancers, diabetes and heart disease, one reader hoped. People will use large, but efficient, vehicles for long trips but small cars for work or errands because of fuel costs, another said.

More people will own aircraft because the costs to do so will go down, Larry Mullendore, then the manager at The Eastern Iowa Airport, said. I found a 1994 Cessna Citation jet listed for $1.19 million but also a couple of Cessna 172/180 Conversion aircraft for around $59,000 on the Internet.

“I think useless technology will be formed but might function as a big part of our lives,” a student then attending Iowa City West High School told us as 1999 wound down. I don't know what ever happened to that person. I couldn't find him on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter.

Large family farms will mix with small diversified farms and expand the kinds of products Iowa produces, then-Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Patty Judge said. Some of that has happened. Judge, meanwhile, moved into the lieutenant governorship for four years and Francis Thicke, a Fairfield-area organic farmer who uses a buy-local model ran for secretary of agriculture scored only 35 percent of the vote last month.

An entire music library will be stored on a chip smaller than your fingernail, musician and legendary radio announcer Bob Dorr, of Cedar Falls, told us. Digital communication will put AM and FM radio on equal footing, Rick Sellers, who owns KMRY-AM (1450) radio in Cedar Rapids, said. I cannot get AM stereo in my car but you can hear Sellers' station online at www.kmryradio.com, where it is in stereo.

Finally, State Climatologist Harry Hillaker said he expected average temperatures to increase. The average high temperature for December is 30 degrees in Cedar Rapids; it is 34 degrees in Iowa City. We've struggled to reach those temperatures in December.

But Hillaker also noted in December 1999 that while computer projections called for drier weather he thought a tendency toward wetter weather that we were experiencing as the 20

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century closed would continue into the new millennium. Now we know. Armed with hindsight, we would tend to agree.