SETI at the particle level & Fermis’ Paradox: (SI-PI)
As we all know (SETI) or the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is a project that uses radio astronomy to search for other examples of intelligence in the universe. (SIPI) or the Search for Intra-Particulate Intelligence on the other hand is a term coined by AI researcher Hugo de Garis - summed up it basically suggests that once AIs form some type of self awareness and gain agency over their own design processes, they may start to shrink the substrate they run on to make gains on efficiency and speed.
Going from electronic circuits to photonic circuits to more exotic things like running themselves on the interactions within elementary particles and the like.
Here’s a Hugo de Garis quote on the topic:
“Conclusions
The above femtometer scale computation models are “in principle” only. To make them practical will probably require new thinking, to ensure that they are compatible with the severe constraints imposed by the principles of QCD, e.g., quark confinement and asymptotic freedom.
Hopefully, this essay will stimulate other researchers to enter this new research field of femtotech. Perhaps the “other side” of technology (the “building stuff” side, in contrast with the computational side) can be implemented with glueballs as well, or with quark/gluon “condensates.”
One thing is clear. If humanity does not make any progress along the lines of femtotech, sooner or later, human beings (or our artificially intelligent successors) will be scratching at the “nanotech walls” that confine us.
One final comment I’m thinking of trying to create an “attotech” (i.e., on the scale of 10-18 meters) by using the weak-force particles (W and Z particles) that interact not only with quarks, but with the much lighter leptons (e.g., electrons, etc) as well.
Human technology has progressed from millitech, to microtech, to (recently) nanotech, and this essay attempts to start the thinking on femtotech (and attotech).
This downscaling trend provides a potential answer to the famous “Fermi paradox” (if intelligent life is so commonplace in the universe, “where are they?”). If intelligent creatures or machines can continue to “scale down” in their technologies, the answer to Fermi’s question would become “They are all around us, whole civilizations living inside elementary particles, too small for us to detect.”
“What we perceive as random fluctuations on the quantum level may actually be the ‘thoughts’ of shrunken super-intelligences that exist all around us, because there’s no way we can tell ‘random’ from ‘structured’ but with an algorithmic information more complex than our brains”
- Ben Goertzel
There’s an interesting article about neuromorphic computing at the atomic scale, which is in a similar vein to the above:
Posted Jan 1, 2024, 4:28 AM UTC