No Stupid Questions

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.

only effect on me is running some ethernet cable by and large. I hate cell phones.

If it's from outer space, there's frequencies that are absorbed by the atmosphere. We don't use them because their range sucks. Blasting the sky with enough of that to make a difference on the ground would surely have worse side effects than 'the wifi is down.' It would be a doomsday weapon. If we presume that's not the scenario, then short-range connections would remain feasible. So would line-of-sight protocols using lasers or infrared blinkenlights.

(Please don’t say “kill the aliens” they have tech so advanced, its impossible to do it)

The dark comedy version of this wouldn't even leave it as an option: they could blast radio waves toward Earth's future position. An intergalactic churro of electromagnetism in transit. And anywhere on that side of the Earth, anything resembling a cats-whisker AM radio buzzes out a weaponized instance of "nine billion bottles of beer on the wall."

Actually, if we're going hard sci-fi on the effect (but hand-waving the plausibility of the cause) then a lot of metallic things become dangerous. Any long piece of wire becomes a fork in the microwave. As someone else points out: this is also Tesla's free-energy towers. Deeply ironic, considering that portable electronics are now a lot less useful!

Anyway: if it's not from outer space, but sort of emanates all over, that's a different story. Fun causes, too. Like if our galaxy wandered somewhere that vacuum energy worked differently. Instead of virtual particles you get virtual static. Very exciting for physicists. Nobody else is happy.

GPS doesn't work - though with 2020s technology we'd immediately do camera-based dead reckoning and mapping for airplanes. Cars? Nope, better pay attention to street signs and manually confirm when you reach a turn. Oh, and we're all going back to MP3 players and aux jacks, since Spotify, Sirius, and 101.3 The Claw are all fucked.

The omnipresence of internet access would be maintained. The demand is too high. But now it'd mean ethernet ports everywhere, like a college classroom built circa 2000. No, wait: "li-fi" blinking LEDs would finally catch on. Less wear and tear. You can still plug in some fiber-optic cable to be sure there's a connection. Otherwise you have to huddle around a lightbulb, or be in the same closed room, in order to use the mobile internet. Bandwidth's a non-issue - but you'd never "stream" anything, versus downloading it and walking away. The unreliability of being able to purchase bullshit at a moment's notice would have a huge positive effect on mobile games.

Terrestrial television would end, which I assume matters to somebody. In the US the FCC would cease to exist as an excuse to censor media.

This sounds awesome! I welcome our new alien overlords who make people stop looking at their god damned phone while walking and driving.

Isn't this what a major solar flare is expected to do?

They can't: the speed of light is so slow that they don't even know we are here yet. even if they are in the tiny zone where we are detectable with arbitary technology, they can't get here in your lifetime because the distance is so large. they have to get here because to cover all sides of a round planet needs something on all sides since many useful frequencies don't go through the earth, not to mention they don't have enough energy available to pull this off from their home., there are a few more reasons this is impossible that I'm not aware of.

All of them? including visible light?