Say, some alien just wanted to mess with us, but doesn’t invade, or even care enough to want to kill us, but seeing how everyone is on their phone all the time, they decided to just jam all our radios to watch us suffer. Their transmitting power they use is so powerful, its jamming signals are 1000 times stronger than the strongest radios we have, so there’s no way we can overpower the jamming.
What does the immediate aftermath look like?
What does it look like in the long term?
(Please don’t say “kill the aliens” they have tech so advanced, its impossible to do it)
Wired communications would take over immediately and it would be a massive pain in the ass, but we’d ultimately adapt.
If the EM jamming is enough to also degrade the signal in copper lines, which at 1000x the strongest signal, might happen, then basically all modern society would collapse within 48 hours
If the jamming was spread spectrum and affected wired signals, it would also be strong enough to cook every living thing on the planet.
“Dang it, I’m being cooked AND the internet isn’t working!”
Dude, the internet is cooked!
WE’RE being cooked!
That too.
Yummy fried human meat! 😋
I guess if the aliens were carbon-based, it would let them cook planets and then sample the biological products at leisure.
The oceans and lakes would boil off, of course.
We better not run out of whales then
To serve men.
At what point does an EM jamming signal just become electricity running through the wires? That’s what would happen in a so called Harrington event, right?
Interestingly in Ukraine they are beginning to use drones with huge spools of fibre optic cable to transmit control and video signals. They’re doing this because of the jamming.
They also did that in Dr Stone
Not nessasarilly. U can reletivly easily block signal jamming for a confined area with a Faraday cage and most long distance is fibre optic nowdays.
You can also buy shielded Ethernet cables (especially for installation parallel to power lines) which would be much, much harder to jam.
In addition to wired you’d probably also see an uptick in line of sight optical transmissions via laser. Both of those options would really be the only two ways around it.
For me, since my entire house is wired, I’d just lose use of my cell phone. Most all internet infrastructure is wired too, so all that would continue to operate.
I wonder if there’d be enough fiber communications to get by.
If the signal is too strong, it’d certainly interfere with the circuitry inside everything electronic, even optical network modems within PCI adapters (computers).
Radio waves cause induction.
For urban areas probably. Ohh and the stock market would be fine.
Yeah, the dedicated cables for international market coordination and HFC would be unaffected except in the most dire situation.