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Kessler syndrome cascade. The Kessler syndrome is about satellites, once you have an overpopulation they collide, smash into smaller bits, causing more collisions, causing more impacts, until its foolish to launch another satellite to replace the damaged ones because it'll get destroyed immediately and merely create more junk that destroys whats already up there, and launching an armored (military) satellite would just result in more bits of armor destroying more satellites, etc. Likewise the analogy goes that every receiver needs a certain minimal signal to noise ratio to operate, to demodulate correctly with an acceptable bit error rate. Well, if the noise level goes up your only option is to increase transmitter power level which eats battery and ruins the environment and makes your radio link work, but you just increased the noise level for all the OTHER systems nearby which have to increase their power levels until your system doesn't work, rinse and repeat until nothing works. A real world historical example is the social media like, CB radio boom of the late 70s. I realize not too many people here are old enough to remember that. But a system that worked well for a modest number of users at a legal and clean 5 watts of transmitter power, suddenly had way too high a density of users, all running illegal noisy 100 watt amplifiers because they wanted to be heard over other illegal noisy 100 watt amplifier users, etc. Eventually the system completely collapsed and all the users left because it didn't work for anyone anymore and CB is in the dustbin of history, pretty much. In the long run to an end user it would look like in the countryside your bluetooth or wifi or anything else that uses radio will have a very long lasting battery and great range and be pretty reliable although the hardware will be much more expensive than it is now to try and work in the city, but in the city the battery life drops by a significant fraction, everything is slow and unreliable, range drops from across a large room to just a couple inches for bluetooth if it works at all, wifi is unusable in some areas that have hundreds of access points interfering with each other, etc. Some services would simply stop working in a very high noise environment due to high difficulty of increasing transmitter power. No more GPS, broadcast radio, possibly cell phone service, probably no more police/fire radios. The concept of a police car no longer having a usable reliable radio is weird. |