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)
All of them? including visible light?
Pulls out my big box of old CAT5 cables… Who’s the packrat now?!
The volunteer firefighter effect leads me to suspect you were behind the jamming all along!
we use wired communications until the issue is solved.
In the three body problem books one of the main plot points is a very similar scenario (although not identical). No spoilers but it might be worth a read / watch.
Which version, aren’t there a couple ones you can watch?
I haven’t read the books, but I did watch both versions, and they’re both decent, but I would recommend the Chinese version. Not only is it obviously more faithful to the books (you can just tell as it is so much more detailed than the Netflix version), but I found it fascinating to watch a high budget series from China, as I’ve never seen any Chinese art/media at that level. Interesting to see how they are and aren’t influenced by Western media.
I wouldn’t say the Netflix version was bad (much much shorter, and not the full story yet) though. I wonder if the portrayals of the Cultural Revolution in the Chinese version were white washed a bit (though I will say that, surprisingly, it was slightly critical of the CCP at times).
I’ve read the English books. The Netflix series was kinda faithful to the books but it’s only season 1 so far. It’s not finished yet. There’s a Chinese tv series as well which is a lot harder to find but I’ve watched a bit of it and it seems much more like a direct adaptation of the books.
Is the chinese show caught up on the booksnor still unfinished?
What does it look like in the long term?
If they don’t stop, we’ll start using their jamming as a source of power for small mobile devices. It’s free energy at that point.
I am sure someone will use it as a pretence for invasion. I loosely remember reading somewhere that jamming can be classified as an act of war but I don’t recall where I heard it.
“A communications disruption can mean only one thing. Invasion!”
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Jamming isn’t so trivial because it’s not really the volume but the signal to noise ratio that really matters no matter how much energy the aliens use. Therefore, I propose that this question doesn’t make technical sense.
Take for example GPS. The signal strength is way below the noise and you can’t really hear it at all because it’s so weak. The background noise is overwhelmingly loud already. You have to process the signal out of the noise using special techniques to collect the energy you care about using statistical correlation. While can still jam the signal in general, jamming requires that you understand how the signal is being used to impact that signal to noise ratio and stop the information flow. Simply screaming into all frequencies might not have all that much impact unless you understand what a signal means for each use case. Many wireless applications are even point to point links that are great at rejecting inputs outside of the intended direction and even the wrong polarization. There are physical limitations that preclude a general all signal jammer.
That said, let’s say the aliens understand all of our wireless communication protocols. I think people would adapt after a short period of disruption because it wasn’t all that long ago that we were using wires for business and critical functions. Heck, some industry still use fax machines and famously a lot of old government tech still has software stored on floppy disc. I think we’ll be OK. Might even be better for our mental health once the phones stop working.
Why can’t the aliens just use a quantum RNG to set the nanosecond to nanosecond amplitude change on each individual frequency?
Might even be better for our mental health once the phones stop working.
Ethernet to USB-C adapter sales go BRRRR
The cheap ones make a lot of noise already. I imagine to a passing alien spaceship we look like a giant EMP.
Jamming isn’t so trivial because it’s not really the volume but the signal to noise ratio that really matters no matter how much energy the aliens use. Therefore, I propose that this question doesn’t make technical sense.
Tell that to my microwave and WiFi router.
Wi-Fi is interesting. It’s designed for maximum bandwidth at low power levels. It also has a carrier sense system to prevent interference with other unknown devices on the unlicensed spectrum. Most things are sacrificed for that bandwidth, such as exploiting multipath and spatial propagation differences to squeeze out every last drop of data. Orthogonal carriers are spaced very close together maximize the available spectrum.
Still in this case, Wi-Fi operates at other frequencies that do not get microwave interference, and wireless network might explicitly be trying not to interfere with the microwave because it could be a device trying to share the unlicensed spectrum. The other Wi-Fi frequencies don’t go very far and aren’t good at penetrating walls, so the amount of power that an alien spaceship would have to use to block these signals categorically is crazy high. at some point you don’t have a jammer but a giant space death ray.
I’m not saying they couldn’t degrade it, but jamming them all? That sounds like a very challenging ask. Your microwave shares your living space. Meanwhile your wireless router politely avoids speaking when the microwave appears to be talking.
(Please don’t say “kill the aliens” they have tech so advanced, its impossible to do it)
Usa would send all their nukes in an attempt to kill the aliens anyway, because otherwise some top militarists would feel their whole life meaningless.
No we wouldn’t, there’s a documentary about this kind of thing. We’d send a super-talented pilot and the World’s greatest hacker (who no one listened to). And they would fly into the Alien ship and the hacker would hack it and it would blow up.
there’s a documentary about this
I see.
Is it the one where the world class hero asks the pilot “When we start our attack flight right through the sun, isn’t it going to be rather hot there?” and the talented pilot explains “No, stupid, don’t you know we are going at night?”
I don’t think it’s that one, though that pilot is a pretty smart fella!
It’s this one…
The smart guy: You really think you can fly that thing?
The pilot: You really think you can do all that bullshit you just said?
Lol the alien would just be like: “Rude little creatures, lets turn the frequency into microwaves and amplify it a million times, point them all converging directly at those creatures (referring to Americans)”
My whole family is going to start complaining that the WiFi is busted and I need to fix it.
Lol, I’m sure they’ll appreciate those long-ass ethernet cables + the Ethernet to USB-C adaptor.
So, EVERY radio on the planet is suddenly overwhelmed by broad-spectrum jamming from orbital sources? Every cell phone, wifi, broadcast TV, satellite, AM/FM?
A bunch of people die,.due to distracted-driving car accidents with no way to call for help. News and government adapt modestly quickly, since the Internet itself runs mostly on already-shielded wires. There is a run on ethernet cables and phone modems for a bit, though, since not everyone has one. Navigation and timekeeping get harder, since no GPS or radio time sync, but humans adapt to those fairly quickly.
Long-term consequences depend on how long the aliens keep it up. It’s definitely a holy crap there are aliens! moment, though, since a bunch of sudden radio transmitters would be detected in the sky and identified as alien tech way before the toilet paper shortage even starts.
“way before the toilet paper shortage even starts.” LMAO.
Kill the aliens.
Srsly tho, it’s not about the tech they have or the 1000x power. Any jamming can be circumvented, and humans would have a much greater motivation to adapt than the aliens would.
Please don’t say “kill the aliens” they have tech so advanced, its impossible to do it
Somehow I don’t think this would prevent the US government from running up a fuckton of debt trying it anyway, and getting us involved in yet another unwinnable forever-war quagmire.
Anyway, you can wirelessly communicate with light rather than radio, although you’re obviously limited to line of sight. Optical laser transmission technologies already exist for specialized applications. I predict that until we finally got lasers good enough to use them to deal with those pesky aliens, any communication that truly needed to be wire-free would be converted to lasers instead.
Depends exactly how “modern” you mean, i guess. It seems like whatever humans would be doing is whatever the invincible alien overlords would either: permit; or, don’t care enough to stop.
Why would they come here (close enough) just to jam some radio? Is this an omicron perseiei VIII thing.
I prefer programs with the tite “World’s ‘blankiest’ ‘blank’.”Why would they come here (close enough) just to jam some radio?
Think about how kids would be cruel and use a magnifying glass on a sunny day to bun ants. This is like that. But staight up killing humans wouldn’t be so entertaining, so they decided to mess with us. They see people so addicted to phones, phones use radios, so they decided to jam the radios. They don’t care if we live or die, but just want to see what happens. Our response to this would be entertainment to them
only effect on me is running some ethernet cable by and large. I hate cell phones.
