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I want to solve the age-old (decades-old) question of how to bork or severely restrict wireless (radio, WiFi, satellite, cell phones, etc.) communication (semaphore is allowed, I guess, but it's not going to become incredibly useful). Because, you know, plot contrivance. Wired communication (telephone, internet, etc.) should still work. One traditional answer is to set your plot before the invention of ________, but I want a modern world with YouTube and Netflix and JNCO jeans and drastically changed seafaring/flying.

My solution is that most of the Radio Spectrum (let's say from VLF to EHF) after some event(s) has so much noise that producing intelligible signals—even after utilizing signal processing techniques—is so inefficient as to render such communication all but nonexistent.

Nobody is investing in massive shields that protect entire cities. NASA or Google or whoever may have the odd building they've designed to allow the continued use of ________, but for 99.9999% of people it's all gone.

The setting is modern (20X0s) Earth ten to twenty years after whatever event(s) caused this change. The world is still functional, albeit changed (the setting is not apocalyptic). There is no magic.

Why/how did this happen? Are there any other consequences?

Answers don't need to be "hard-science", but a link or two would be nice.

Ideally, beyond the impact on wireless communication, the event(s) shouldn't be too paradigm-shifting (a solution that would seem too drastic: a cup of neutron star matter has apocalypsed part of the world and is emitting massive amounts of RF waves).

ifThisIsAMan
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  • Related: Why might radios not be effective in a post apocalyptic world. – Escaped dental patient. Mar 11 '22 at 16:46
  • Welcome ifThis.... Please take our [tour] and refer to the [help] for guidance as to our ways. Enjoy Worldbuilding. – Escaped dental patient. Mar 11 '22 at 16:47
  • Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. – Community Mar 11 '22 at 16:48
  • Is everybody blind in this world? Because vision is a form of wireless communication. (And I really don't see what you could do to make microwave links unfeasible while still allowing people to see.) – AlexP Mar 11 '22 at 16:53
  • I did acknowledge that semaphore, a communications medium that traditionally relies upon human sight, was still possible. I was asking about wireless communication systems that utilize the RF spectrum. Would the question be better formatted as a feasibility question? Something along the lines of "would it be feasible for a large amount of noise to render the radio spectrum unusable without impairing basic human bodily function, including eyesight?" – ifThisIsAMan Mar 11 '22 at 17:06
  • I don't know what you have in mind when you say semaphore, but free-space high-speed data optical communication is a real thing. You cannot have human vision and not have medium distance (as in a few tens of kilometers) free-space optical and microwave data links. (And if you don't want mushy answers suitable only for young children's literature, you need to specify the power levels of the radio-deafening noise. In W/m². You may find out that you need an awful lot of energy to cover all the EM spectrum in a blanket of noise. Energy which will have side effects.) – AlexP Mar 11 '22 at 17:20
  • You're right, having the W/m^2 would help. The problem is I don't know how to arrive at that. I guess I would need to find out how signal jamming works (probably on a different SE or forum). I don't know if you would have to have a strong uniform noise across every single frequency in the range, if a sufficiently strong noise every X Hz would work, or something else (or if the two modes I mentioned would work and have identical/similar power requirements). – ifThisIsAMan Mar 11 '22 at 17:43
  • I am aware you can't block these signals completely, but I thought that it would become very innefficient to broadcast. Ex: commercial radio isn't the strongest industry (compared to 50ish years ago). Signal strength degrades with 1/m^2 so power at the receiver is usually very low. I thought something as low as 0.002W would severely impact range. I'm not sure radio would be viable if copious repeaters or very high wattage were required. It could remain viable in very dense metropolises, which would be interesting, I guess? – ifThisIsAMan Mar 11 '22 at 18:00
  • The optical communication doesn't seem to be high bandwidth or long-distance enough to be a setting-breaker. I just want to make most wireless options uneconomical, compared to wired ones. Anyway, it seems I can't provide enough specifics (pending understanding signal jamming), so maybe this should be closed unless someone does all that work for me (unreasonable to expect). But I'd still appreciate answers that provide some phenomena that emit wide bands of intense RF (no need to do too much math). It feels people are focusing on a lot of the context for my question, should I remove it? – ifThisIsAMan Mar 11 '22 at 18:18
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    What is largest source of noise in our solar system? The sum. For story reason the sun is producing more noise in spectrum range below infrared. – Gault Drakkor Mar 11 '22 at 21:17

4 Answers4

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Smart dust and jamming

During the recent crisis between North America and Eurasia, the two sides avoided an all-out nuclear war by sending many small drones loaded with "smart dust" - tiny spy bugs that send occasional chirps of information back to their home countries. Every home was invaded, every business, every password recorded, every compromising moment taken.

In rage, one side or the other, probably both, channeled Project West Ford and scorched the sky. No more satellites picking up these transponders each at their own daily millisecond. Not having space any more hurt communication a bit. The HAARP project attacking the ionosphere interfered a little more, not nearly enough.

Eventually, all the countries started interfering with the spy operations by just all-out interference, controlled by AI to try to mimic smart dust signals to block and interfere with them.

Of course, some of the dust still manages to get access to a landline anyway, but the amount of spying it can do is comparatively reduced.

Mike Serfas
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Auroral kilometric radiation.

Auroral kilometric radiation (AKR) is the intense radio radiation emitted in the acceleration zone (at a height of three times the radius of the Earth) of the polar lights. The radiation mainly comes from cyclotron radiation from electrons orbiting around the magnetic field lines of the Earth. The radiation has a frequency of between 50 and 500 kHz and a total power of between about 1 million and 10 million watts. The radiation is absorbed by the ionosphere and therefore can only be measured by satellites positioned at vast heights, such as the Fast Auroral Snapshot Explorer (FAST)... The sound produced by playing AKR over an audio device has been described as "whistles", "chirps", and even "screams".

Want to listen to it?

In your world, the directionality of the kilometric radiation inverts and intensifies. Now it all goes directly down onto the earth. It is random, weird and deafening on nearly all the radio broadcast spectrum.

Some people in your world listen to it anyway. They think they can hear voices. I was listening for a while to the link and I started to think that. I turned it off. I was afraid to hear what they were saying.

Willk
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Repeat the Carrington Event

You will knock out everything you just mentioned. The down side is you will also do damage to any wired connections which are not shielded and hardened.

Telegraph lines drew arcs around the planet. Telegraphs operated by DC battery back then, operators in Tulsa disconnected their batteries and were still able to send messages. On a completely unpowered circuit. If the sun got in a bad mood today, our planes would be grounded, you wouldn’t be able to call anyone, and fairly well everything we rely on would glitch, burp, or just die.

According to the NOAA, a solar storm on the scale of the Carrington Event today could severely damage satellites, disable communications via telephone, radio and TV and cause electrical blackouts

(Carrington Event major spike recorded by the British Geological Survey, September 1, 1859)

If you need it to be semi-permanent, I think the sun could arrange that. It would take some explaining.

Even if it’s not permanent, you can have it periodically emitting like a pulsar. Some strange process of the sun that has never been observed before, shoots out these storms every year and we just can’t rebuild that fast. I have a novel idea on this: a planet-sized asteroid from the Oort cloud hits the sun and punches a hole in the chromosphere, that will take centuries to calm down again.

No matter what “noise-based” problem you invent, noise is noise, and power is power. Signal-to-noise ratio will still be a ratio that we can probably overcome, with enough money. Only magic can make radio communication “impossible.”

Vogon Poet
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Government Regulation

There is no wireless communication because your government forbids it for a combination of "national security" and/or "Public Health" reasons.

The National Security Reason

Wireless communication is behind spy drones, pineapples (automated wifi hacking devices), Pwn Phones (special phones used for wireless hacking), and all sorts of other cyber crime devices. Currently these threats make up a very small portion of cyber-crime attacks, but as tech literacy increases; so, is the use of before considered "specialty" hacking devices.

The government may have at first tried to crack down on the use of criminal wireless devices, but thanks to how many wireless signals there are out there, there is no real way to regulate it. By making wireless communication illegal, you take away the incentive for drive-by MiM attacks.

The Public Health Reason

There are reports that wireless communication can cause possible health problems over a long period of exposure. In our current day, these reports are mostly inconclusive, but as we gather more longitudinal data moving into the future, we may find that these health concerns are more justified than we realized at first. And just like lead in gasoline or mercury in medicine, it maty become another one of those ridiculously stupid things that the previous generation did to F themselves up.

Nosajimiki
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