EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a weekly series on our region’s history coordinated by the Trumbull County Historical Society

Imagining what the future looks like is a massive undertaking. Executing that vision and making it a reality is even more challenging.

Everyone has a different vision of the future. “Star Trek” imagines sleek, smooth, streamlined starships that are almost hospital-like. In contrast, franchises like “Blade Runner” or “Fallout” imagine the future as darker, dirtier and more industrial. Even much of the technology in “Star Wars” doesn’t hide the wires and inner workings of the various machines that populate the scenes.

With all the possibilities for how the future can look, it might be surprising that Modern Props, the Hollywood prop company founded by Warren native John Zabrucky, created props that can fit with nearly any vision of the future one might have.

What we ultimately see as representations of the future is what people in the past (or the soon-to-be past) thought the future would look like. Even then, most of those depictions are commentaries on the present in which they were created. Futures that are shiny and clean with the wires and mechanisms hidden away often tend to come from periods that are more optimistic about what’s to come. Even if there are conflicts, the future is generally more hopeful and progressive in a way that broadly benefits humanity.

“Star Trek” is a particularly interesting example because of the impacts it had on the real world — impacts we still see today. Since it attracted a younger audience, viewers were inspired to go into the sciences and make so much of what they saw on screen come to life. From tablets, cellphones, and Bluetooth headsets to 3D printers, teleconferencing and virtual assistants like Apple’s SIRI, people created the technologies that have brought us all one step closer to Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. Not everyone who worked on these technologies was directly inspired by “Star Trek,” nor was “Star Trek” the first or only instance of them, but the franchise has an undeniable impact on advancements that have been and will continue to be made.

While some depictions of the future serve as hopeful guides for us in the present, others serve more as a warning of what could happen if we continue along our current path.

Although the bombs fell in 2077, “Fallout”‘s America maintains the trappings of 1950s idealism and consumerism. Underground “vaults” are pitched as the way to protect your loved ones from the blast, but, in reality, most contain experiments run by the companies and individuals that invested in the project. The vaults seem an elegant solution to the problem, but only for those who could afford a spot. Everyone left on the surface has to deal with the consequences of actions far outside their control for generations to come.

With strokes of the bright and cheery “duck and cover” mentality of the 1950s, the “Fallout” franchise depicts a post-apocalyptic America with the remains of advanced technology (if you’re lucky enough to find it) and the very real problems of individuals, towns, and a few organizations struggling to survive in a wasteland by working with and retrofitting what remains.

At the upcoming science fiction museum right here in Warren, we’ll have the opportunity to explore how people of the past imagined the future and allow us to imagine the future yet to come.