[StrangeATractor]

I heard a tale in the days of yore where a radio station was not getting the range promised by the laws of physics. When they did some investigating they found an engineer that lived next door to the tower was syphoning power from the radio waves as part of a home experiment.

I'm not qualified to determine the plausibility of this, but I hope it's true.

[mock-possum]

It’s a nice ‘Edison vs Tesla’ type story - but I’m pretty skeptical that there’s any truth to it. It just doesn’t seem viable enough to bother doing, for how much of a hardware setup you’d need versus how much electricity you’d be ‘harvesting’, to the extent that it meaningfully impacts the signal range itself.

Like unless this engineer built the Russian woodpecker array

[atahanacar]

Can you siphon power from the sun so other people can't get its radiation, without you covering the entire surface with something like a Dyson sphere?

[Schroedingersat]

If your object is roughly the size of a wavelength or less, it can siphon off power that would be a few wavelengths away.

So a bacterium might be able to annoy their neighbor. But that's about it.

If the sun was in some kind of equilibrium with stuff around it (ie. There was a big mirror acting kinda analogously to a ground plane) you could effectively cast a shadow much bigger than yourself.

But that's about it. Visible light is very small.

[philistine]

Mr. Burns managed to do it.

[Rebelgecko]

In moderation, isn't that a potential upside of space based solar farms?

[mike256]

Are black holes allowed?