Genetic Savings and Clone, in Sausalito, Calif., will clone your cat for $50,000. Virgin Galactic promises $190,000 space tours in the not-too-distant future. Alcor Life Extension Foundation will preserve your cadaver today for $150,000 — or your head alone for $80,000 — to lock-in the chance of being resurrected at some future date.

Scientific progress provides invaluable benefits to society, but discoveries and inventions increasingly are being offered to satisfy the desires of wealthy individual consumers.

By the end of this decade, consumers will be sporting wearable computing devices that offer always-on Internet access. Our contact lenses will beam images to our retina so everywhere we walk, we'll see a virtual-reality image. When friends call, we'll see them as though we're face-to-face.

At least that's the future according to inventor Ray Kurzweil, a technology-product developer, member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the world's largest single cash prize for invention.

And we'll all be skinnier.

"One drug you'll see will let you eat as much as you want and remain slim," Kurzweil said. "It's going to be a blockbuster drug. It'll be like Viagra squared."

Already, this drug is working in mice, he said. And other drugs will attack and slow various aging processes.

"There are hundreds of these designer drugs in the pipeline now," said Kurzweil, co-author of a book on the science of reversing aging, "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever."

Whether tech products or blockbuster drugs, prices often start steep.

"Typically, these things start out expensive. The companies are trying to recoup their development investment," he said.

But "they're actually extremely inexpensive to make. Look at AIDS drugs. They started out at $30,000 to $40,000 per year per patient. Now they're down to a few hundred dollars per year."

Until the future gets here, consumers will have to settle for current science. Some are happy to do just that.

Genetic Savings & Clone boasts "a few hundred customers," said spokesman Ben Carlson. But most are simply banking their cats' and dogs' cells for now, at prices ranging from $295 to $1,395, to keep their cloning options open.

"By gene banking you preserve the option to clone. Some of our clients simply could not afford to clone at $50,000. They're counting on our ability to increase the efficiency of the process (and to) bring that price down considerably," Carlson said.

This year, "we're focused strongly on automating some of the labor-intensive steps. As we are able to do that, capacity increases, price goes down," he said