If you look at the number of stars for a long time, you will probably start to wonder the same thing that scientists and philosophers have been doing year after year: if there are so many potential worlds, where everyone is, and why no one is communicating? The solutions to what is known as the Fermi Paradox range from horrible to really horrible. But a new pre-printed paper (not yet peer-reviewed) by Quantum Physicist at Imperial College London offers a new possibility: What if the stars themselves are hiding alien messages there?
Terry Rudolph suggested in his research paper that if aliens were willing to communicate over vast distances without warning others about their message, they might be able to do so in a way that is no different from thermal radiation for any other species heard in the sky. The basic principle is that the species scattered in a star can then send messages by encapsulating photons in individual stars, interfering with other stars, and changing the light given by one star.
The receiver can then check their message by observing the second star, using linear optics. “Photons can propagate billions of light-years and retain significant quantum coordinates,” Rudolph wrote in the paper.
“One consequence of this is that a fairly advanced civilization can measure quantum non-demolition of photon numbers in the appropriate mode of light emitted from stars, in such a way that subsequent useful large-scale entanglements are distributed through free-space propagation. That light travels through the universe.” He believes the method would be particularly attractive to paranoid aliens because of how difficult it would be to distinguish it from normal thermal signatures.
“The result is that when we look at stars and see only heat radiation, we usually conclude that the universe is empty,” he wrote. “But perhaps, relying on the interrelationships of that radiation, the universe is actually bathing in alien chatter and other distributed quantum data processing.” Although the (incredibly complex) method he proposed is possible according to the laws of physics as we understand them, he does not suggest that it is a way that aliens are communicating, only that it is a method by which they can communicate.
