Terry Rudolph, a professor of quantum physics at Imperial College London, suggests that interstellar light could actually be harnessed by space faring aliens to form an encrypted quantum internet. Motherboard reports: This may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but Rudolph says it was actually a natural extension of what he does as co-founder of PsiQuantum, a Silicon Valley-based company on a mission to build a scalable photonic quantum computer. He laid out his idea in a paper recently published on the arXiv preprint server. Rudolph said the idea for the paper on aliens communicating with quantum starlight flowed from his work on quantum computers. Unlike the quantum computers being pursued by the likes of Google or Intel that use superconducting circuits or trapped ions at incredibly cold temperatures to create qubits (the quantum equivalent of a computer bit), photonic computers use light to accomplish the same thing. While Rudolph says this kind of quantum design is unconventional, it does also have advantages over its rival — including being able to operate at room temperature and easy integration into existing fiber optic infrastructure.
The primary way the aliens would create this kind of quantum internet is through a quantum mechanics principle called entanglement, explains Rudolph. In a nutshell, entanglement is a phenomena in which the quantum states of particles (like photons) are linked together. This is what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance” and means that disturbing one particle will automatically affect its partner, even if they’re miles apart. This entanglement would allow aliens — or even humans — to send encrypted signals between entangled partners, or nodes. Now, scale that single computer system up to a network potentially spanning the entire cosmos.
Aliens aside, Rudolph says that his paper demonstrates that building a photon-based quantum internet here on Earth might be “much easier than we expected.” As for the aliens, even if they were using this kind of technology to transform waves of light into their own personal chat rooms, we’d have no way of knowing, says Rudolph. And even if we could pick out these light patterns in the sky, we still wouldn’t be able to listen in. This is due to the incredibly shy nature of quantum particles — any attempt to observe them by an outside party would alter their state and destroy the information they were carrying.
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