From a fascinating piece in the New York Times:
The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, ...are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, can store information even in the absence of an electrical current and ...can be used for both data processing and storage applications.
The most advanced transistor technology today is based on minimum feature sizes of 30 to 40 nanometers — by contrast a biological virus is typically about 100 nanometers — and ...H.P. now has working 3-nanometer memristors that can switch on and off in about a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second, ...[and] the company could have a competitor to flash memory in three years that would have a capacity of 20 gigabytes a square centimeter.
The H.P. technology is based on the ability to use an electrical current to move atoms within an ultrathin film of titanium dioxide. After the location of an atom has been shifted, even by as little as a nanometer, the result can be read as a change in the resistance of the material. That change persists even after the current is switched off, making it possible to build an extremely low-power device.
This is the really fascinating part:
The researchers... devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultradense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits.
Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing systems that function more like biological brains.... "Our brains are made of memristors. ...We have the right stuff now to build real brains."
Let me know when these three-dimensional networks can "learn" by reinforcing used neural pathways and "unlearn" by destroying unused neural pathways, and we will have nano-scale techno-brains that can rival -- and eventually exceed -- our micro-scale bio-brains.
The naturally-evolved intelligence of Homo Sapiens is creating its successor species: Techno Sapiens.
Earthlings WILL explore the galaxy -- it just won't be Homo Sapiens that does it.
Maybe we should stop SETI's current mission of looking for worlds that support bio-life, and change it to looking for worlds that can support techno-life?
To all you young geeks out there: You wanna make a Bill Gates-style fortune?
Get in on the ground floor of creating the brains of Techno Sapiens.