We’ve yet to confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life, but officials don’t seem to be stopping their search anytime soon. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives included funding for a new UFO-reporting system in the country’s annual defense budget and NASA has said it will help other government agencies research Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Even if we don’t find alien life anytime soon, a group of astrophysicists think they could already be out there communicating with each other.
All it boils down to, as a new study suggests, is the ability to use quantum communication. Easy enough, right?
ince scientists on Earth are already in the process of developing quantum communication, physicist Arjun Berera says it stands to reason advanced alien civilizations may have already accomplished it.
“Quantum states you generally think of as very delicate, and if there’s any kind of external interaction, you kind of destroy that state,” Berera said in a recent interview with Science News.
According to the study from Berera and theoretical physicist Jaime Calderón Figueroa, that decoherence would last longer across long distances of space due to the average density of the cosmos. Since that density is much heavier on Earth, Berera and Figueroa say qubits—the smallest piece of the quantum communications puzzle—could theoretically travel great distances in space.
“It is plausible that quantum communication mediated by photons could be established across interstellar distances, in particular for photons in the X-ray region below the electron mass,” the researchers wrote in their published paper. “In principle, it should be possible to detect a quantum signal coming from an astrophysical body or even an intelligent signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.”
Should scientists hope to find the existence to find aliens, they could look towards quantum communication and signals for proof of extraterrestrial life.
You can read the full study on the APS website here.
