…According to a new hypothesis proposed by Terry Rudolph, a professor of quantum physics at Imperial College London, alien communications might’ve been hidden right under our noses…in the starlight.

“What I show is that alien civilizations can, in principle, run their own quantum internet in such a way that to the creatures excluded from the conversation (us!) we will only ever see thermal electromagnetic radiation,” Rudolph says in an email. “All we would see, if they did use the effect I propose, is some very random looking thermal light.”

In other words, Rudolph is suggesting that interstellar light could actually be harnessed by space faring aliens to form an encrypted quantum internet.

This may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but Rudolph says it was actually a natural extension of what he does as co-founder of PsiQuantum, a Silicon Valley-based company on a mission to build a scalable photonic quantum computer. He laid out his idea in a paper recently published…

And then he goes ahead and explains it.