In today’s tech-savvy world,
it’s all around you.
An invisible world
of electromagnetic signals and radio waves.
Wi-Fi, or Wireless Fidelity,
is responsible for over 60 percent
of the planet’s internet traffic.
It’s seemingly everywhere.
Yet, imperceptible to the human eye.
But what if you could see it?
Your eyes are pretty remarkable,
and I’m not just saying that to be nice.
You can see colors
over an electromagnetic wavelength
anywhere from 410 nanometers,
here you’ll find violet,
to roughly 680 nanometers,
the home of red.
This is what we call “visible light,”
also known as the visible spectrum.
Its what humans can view
without the aid of any fancy tech devices.
Things like Wi-Fi are invisible to the human eye.
But what if it wasn’t?
There are upwards of 4 billion people
accessing the internet around the world.
That’s a lot of Wi-Fi signals.
If you could see them,
you would be peeking into the unseen world
of electromagnetic fields.
Wi-Fi is all about
transmitting and receiving data
in the gigahertz (GHz) range.
If you woke up one day with the ability
to see these signals,
you would see frequencies up to 30 GHz,
wavelengths greater than 10 millimeters (0.4 inches.)
Not so bad, right?
Well, it is speculated
that Wi-Fi waves, or pulses, are approximately
15 centimeters (six inches) apart.
So imagine a bombardment of colored bands
taking over your vision.
With everything we have in our homes
that relies on Wi-Fi
and the ever-expanding
availability of the signal,
like city-wide public Wi-Fi networks,
the visual stimulation would be too much.
It would be overwhelming, to say the least.
Prepare yourself for the worst headache
in the history of headaches.
It would be inescapable.
Wi-Fi routers or antennas can be attached
to almost anything,
including trees, buildings, lamp posts
and other structures.
If you think that
fleeing to the wilderness would work,
a typical outdoor router can project its signal
300 feet or more from its location.
All those routers will be creating
a circular data field around them.
Talk about being surrounded!
There have also been claims that
just being exposed to electromagnetic fields
can cause symptoms of anxiety,
depression, nausea and suicidal thoughts.
So, imagine what would happen
if you could see them.
If you could see these signals,
you would probably be looking for
the deepest cave you could find to hide in,
to escape from the constant barrage
of lights and freakiness.
But, could something like this actually happen?
Well, technically we could make this a reality,
but it’s not something
that would ever occur naturally.
It’s easy to take a pair of,
say, infrared goggles off.
But if you were stuck with this ability forever,
you’d be crushed by the overwhelming
amount of visual input.
Overall, the idea of being able to
to witness Wi-Fi in action
sounds like a really cool idea,
but we should limit it to our technology,
not ourselves.
Thankfully, our natural eyes aren’t capable
of seeing this invisible world,
and we should consider ourselves lucky.
Electromagnetic waves can have all sorts
of strange effects on us.
It’s even theorized that they're responsible
for what we know as “ghosts.”
It makes you think, doesn’t it?
What if ghosts were real?