THIS YEAR will soon come to an end, and with it comes the close of a decade – the first decade of the 21st Century.

Once Friday leads to midnight, we not only turn a page in our history for the year, but also open a new chapter in our continuing journey into the future.

When Y2K came to pass, it was almost like an achievement – a monumental event. For many of us folks – especially those who had already been around for a while – the year 2000 seemed like, well, the beginning of the future.

In the classic film “2001: A Space Odyssey, director Stanley Kubrick in 1968 envisioned regular space travel from Earth, outposts established on the moon, missions to Jupiter, extraterrestrial interactions and technology so advanced that machines actually begin thinking on their own and questioning decisions made by humans.

The hit song by musician Prince from the 1982 album of the same name, “1999” also looked to the future – to a New Year’s Eve that would surely set the stage for the biggest party of the millennium. At the turn of the century, or in this case, the turn of the mullein as well, everyone believed entering the year 2000 would not only be a cause for celebration, but a cause for concern. Many feared that computers on which we’ve come to rely would crash when their clocks changed the dates from the familiar 1900s to the alien 2000s.

Folks who lived much of their lives inherently believed decades ago that life in 2000 and beyond would involve flying cars, tin foil suits, space travel, colonies on the moon and beyond, and more of an old-school “science-fiction” way of life.

The film “Back to the Future II” depicts the characters traveling in a time machine 30 years into the future from Oct. 21,1985 to that same date in 2015. In that future setting in the movie, the advanced technology indeed includes flying cars, hovering skate boards and other gadgets.

In life today, although we don’t have flying cars or extraterrestrial diplomacy, we certainly do live in an age with rapidly advancing technology that is focused on everyday use – much to an extent that many of us are quickly becoming dependent on our little machines.

As we look ahead to the new decade of 2011-2020, it’s hard to imagine what the future may bring in terms of technology – not to mention potential advances in medicine, the global economy, international relations and other aspects of “future life.” In fact, sometimes what we imagine the future may bring turns out to be a far stretch from reality.