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What would make radio transmission unfeasible on a planet?

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I am looking for a good reason to make radio communications on a planetary scale unfeasible or impossible. Short-range use is acceptable, but no transmissions should make it to orbit or over the horizon line. Hints on specific type and features of an atmospheres are welcome, as well as scenarios that involve no atmosphere.


Edit concerning radio communications between to and from the planet, as dealt with in a different question: the important part would be that no transmissions would be able to leave the planet and reach orbit.


Edit concerning technologies involved generating "radio" transmissions: i am most interested in the conditions that would make atmospheric or above-surface transmission of radio signals impossible/not worth the effort. i am fine with the idea of using crust-resonance, lasers etc for communications.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/134358. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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What would make radio transmission unfeasible on a planet?

Fierce Geomagnetic Storms.

A non lower-atmospheric solution is a very active sun that releases more or less continuous flares which beat on the upper atmosphere - as they do on Earth in an eleven year cycle - but if the ones squirting out from your star are more or less continuous, then they'd fit the bill.

  • There's the storm of March 9, 1989 which disrupted radio stations - some believed it had been done by the Russians and was the start of something more sinister (it was during the cold war).

enter image description here

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License: Wikipedia 2018.

  • There's a nice chart on Wikipedia about their classifications and how big they get on Earth (a bit like earthquake classifications).

  • There's a brief bit about potential effects on animals when it gets realy bad which may be worth noting.

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