Asklemmy

43971 readers

726 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

162

Is there anything that only the rich can currently afford but that everyone will have in the future? (lemmy.one)

submitted 1 year ago by nitneroc@lemmy.one to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

154 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When the very first cars were built, only the rich could afford it, but now a large part of the population (in developed countries) has one or more.

What do you think will be such an evolution in the future?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Full genome sequencing.

The price of sequencing continues to decrease as the technology evolves. I have already seen claims of under $1,000 for a full human genome. I haven't looked carefully into those claims, but I think we are around there. In some years full genomes will be so cheap to sequence that it will be routine. I want to buy one of those small Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencers in the future. I'll use it like a pokedex.

[–] papajohn@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gene editing/therapy could become cheap in the future.

[–] Maldreamer@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which is how we get gattaca

[–] quicksand@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the full sequencing part would already be Gattaca but I get your point

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

There is a theoretical future in which full-genome sequencing is performed exclusively by large companies, hospitals, and governments, and the data is stored by them and they can access it.

But the technologies are becoming quite accessible. Unless regulations are introduced to force people to give up their genetic data, which I don't think is so likely, there will be ways for us to get our sequences without the sequences being stored by a third party. I also think that there will be FOSS tools for us to run our own analyses.