In a galaxy that should be humming with alien radio waves, space seems very quiet.

A new study suggests that this may be because aliens see that we don’t have the proper quantum equipment to hear them. At least not yet.

Of course, there are a whole host of plausible explanations for why years of searching have failed to turn up even the faintest rumble of inhuman intelligence among the stars. Or, according to Edinburgh University theoretical physicist Letham Boyle, extraterrestrials could take advantage of the use of qubits to increase the bandwidth of the communication channel.

“The possibility of interstellar quantum communication is intriguing because it fundamentally expands the concept of interstellar communication,” Boyle explains in his paper, which you can download from the arXiv pre-review server.

If quantum communication exists, it could be a victory for advanced technology on our planet, but the process will make it impossible to detect without major hardware upgrades.”

Classical communication uses the fundamental properties of electromagnetic waves to transmit a message.

By changing the characteristics of photons, such as their number or frequency, it is possible to transmit information that remains readable across vast interstellar space, allowing a technological species like us to transmit sounds, images, and text at the speed of light.

Quantum mechanics is where classical physics meets gambling, combining the mathematics of probability with the laws that dictate how particles function.

Based on this strange view of the universe, light waves can exist in fuzzy states, entangling their fates so that the sum of their characteristics can be used to compute, observe, communicate, and even teleport information in a way that individual photons cannot do on their own.

Experiments have shown that the fuzzy state of the probability of a photon remains intact at fairly significant distances, which makes the concept of interstellar quantum networks feasible in principle.

To consider how aliens might use the quantum nature of light compared to classical communication technology, Boyle compared the information capacity of each and the different ways in which errors could corrupt classical, quantum, and combined transmission.

The accurate transmission of a radio signal over any distance depends on whether the receiver receives at least a small part of the light waves. In theory, a single photon can transmit a significant amount of information, leaving spare parts for light waves that are lost in the void along the way.

But this is not the case with a quantum connection, where a single transmission involves many photons, most of which must be received in their delicate state for the message to be accurately interpreted.

According to Boyle’s calculations, in order for a sufficient number of quantum states to survive the journey, the width of the transmitting and receiving antennas must be more than 100 kilometers.