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The Quantum Communication Revolution and Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The quantum mechanics race is more intense now than it ever has been as companies fight to be the first to release a user-friendly quantum computer. It won’t be long before quantum computers are a part of all of our lives.

Yusuf Demir
Yusuf DemirCloud & Software Reporter
2 min read
The Quantum Communication Revolution and Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The quantum mechanics race is more intense now than it ever has been as companies fight to be the first to release a user-friendly quantum computer. It won’t be long before quantum computers are a part of all of our lives. Last year China launched the very first ever quantum communication satellite. Primarily designed to test the robustness of quantum entanglement, the Chinese satellite will also probe high-security data encryption, but also a new way of transferring data as quantum information encoded in photons.

So, is this the key to searching for the Extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) signals then?  Maybe. And the reason for that’s because the light that travels close to spinning black holes, in the deformed spacetime, contains quantum information very similar to that we manipulate in the quantum computers you’ll find in many laboratories.

The photons encode quantum bits of information in sequence until they eventually escape the black hole influence.Quantum communication and quantum computation are both naturally occurring phenomena’s and are both studied in great detail by many across the globe. Various university laboratories and private companies across the globe are testing the capabilities of quantum computing in many different aspects. This includes encoding algorithms in photons and transferring quantum bits at distance.

The equipment researchers use today in labs is sufficient to analyze the light coming from space and measure the quantum information stored inside its photons. But, in order to properly identify the encoded messages found in this light we nee to employ the use of some special tools, one of which is the quantum computer.

However, we’re still not quite there yet with a finished version of a quantum computer. We may be close, but not quite there. But that doesn’t mean we should give up in our search for ETI using quantum mechanics. Another thing to consider is a quantum key – a way in which to decrypt quantum messages. Without this we may fail to decipher a hypothetical quantum message ETI may communicate and all would be hopeless anyway.

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Yusuf Demir

Yusuf Demir

Cloud & Software Reporter

Yusuf Demir is the Cloud & Software Reporter at TrendinTech, where he covers cloud infrastructure, enterprise platforms, developer tools and the digital transformation of businesses in the UK and the United States. He previously reported on enterprise technology for The Register in London and covered the cloud and SaaS beat for TechCrunch, following the competition between AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, the open source licensing disputes and the rise of Kubernetes. Yusuf holds an MEng in Computing from Imperial College London and speaks regularly at KubeCon and AWS re:Invent, where he moderates conversations with engineers and chief technology officers. He is most interested in the gap between vendor roadmaps and the systems engineers actually run, and in what the cloud bill looks like once the free credits expire.

All stories by Yusuf Demir (294)