In 1950, Enrico Fermi asked the question that all of us have likely pondered at some point in our lives: Where are all of the aliens? He wasn’t the first to consider this question—Soviet sci-fi legend Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, for one, asked a similar query in some of his unpublished manuscripts—and he certainly wouldn’t be the last. If anything, the question has accumulated ever greater urgency as astronomers have slowly realized that there are likely billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, and we’re discovering more tantalizing, potentially-life-supporting planetary candidates all the time.
This ‘Fermi Paradox’ has spawned dozens of theories, ideas, and hypotheses in the 75 years since. Maybe a “Great Filter” lies in our distant past—the unlikely development of eukaryotic cells is a compelling candidate—or maybe (and this is the real bummer) it still lies ahead in our future. Are the aliens just not interested? A galaxy-spanning intelligence scoring a solid “III” on the Kardashev Scale would likely be indifferent about a sub-I species intent on poisoning its own atmosphere. In other words, maybe we’re an ant among giants.
Or, maybe more simply, aliens are reaching out to us, but we’re just not listening—not in the right way, at least.
In a study published back in 2020 in the journal Physical Review D, University of Edinburgh physicist Arjun Berera determined that quantum communication—that is, communication that leverages photon qubits rather than the more classical radio waves we use today—could maintain what’s known as coherence over interstellar distances. This idea got Berera’s colleague Lantham Boyle, a fellow theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, to start pondering if aliens throughout our galaxy (and beyond) could be using communication technologies outside of the classical realm (specifically quantum communication) that we simply can’t hear.
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