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
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.
If the jamming was spread spectrum and affected wired signals, it would also be strong enough to cook every living thing on the planet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Might even be better for our mental health once the phones stop working.
Ethernet to USB-C adapter sales go BRRRR
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.
Why can’t the aliens just use a quantum RNG to set the nanosecond to nanosecond amplitude change on each individual frequency?
Those random numbers have a random distribution. Random uniform or random normal, I can average out those values to zero to remove the noise. This is indeed what GPS does for example. This wouldn’t be effective for blocking those types of radio signals.
If you want to be effective, you need to know the symbol rate and cater your jamming to the application. There’s also other parameters of a radio signal besides amplitudes like polarity and your signal also has to propagate through free space and make it through the front end of my receiver which could be selective in other ways. You don’t typically have the privilege of transmitting directly into the receiving antenna.
There’s an interesting related area called channel coding that you might be interested in that models noise and interference and figures out how to encode radio signals in ways where they are not easily disturbed.
For your specific example, if you’re talking about changing the value randomly on every nanosecond, I would expect to see a one gigahertz main frequency with lower harmonics, which would likely look like pretty much nothing to most GPS devices.
This sounds awesome! I welcome our new alien overlords who make people stop looking at their god damned phone while walking and driving.
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.
