Perhaps they are everywhere? Undetectable distributed quantum computation and communication for alien civilizations can be established using thermal light from stars

Abstract

We show that free-space diffraction of photons distributes highly useful entanglement: the receivers of the propagated modes can do a distributed quantum computation using only linear optics and photon counting. The distributed computation requires classical communication between receivers, however, similar to standard measurement-based computation, that communication is of purely random outcomes and so can be indistinguishable from noise. The speculation in the title arises from the further observation that the natural way for a circumspect civilization to hide their photonic entanglement distribution is to use the thermal light already being emitted from the various stars they visit. This requires them knowing the number of photons in the modes they have chosen to use, and as such they would need to perform a quantum non-demolition measurement of photon number. Because the thermal light they are measuring is diagonal in the number basis even this process can be rendered in principle indiscernible to those of us excluded from the conversation.

References in corpus (10)

• Resource-efficient linear optical quantum computation
• Most quantum states are too entangled to be useful as computational resources
• Novel schemes for measurement-based quantum computation
• |0>|1>+|1>|0>
• Nonclassical correlations from randomly chosen local measurements
• Demonstration of efficient scheme for generation of "Event Ready" entangled photon pairs from single photon source
• One-way quantum computation with four-dimensional photonic qudits
• Generating entanglement with linear optics
• Creation of Entangled Photonic States Using Linear Optics
• KLM quantum computation as a measurement based computation