My old boss always said "There isn't 200 dB in the entire universe". Of course if you compare the diameter of the universe to a quark, it's 10,453 dBmeters, so I guess there is.
Back when I learned this I was shocked that satellite communications work at all.
I can only imagine how much loss you have trying to hear communications from the Voyager probes now.
Care to explain? I'm not following..
Still, I will try to make an analogy. Start with the smallest transistor we make today, (7nm) and scale it up by the equivalent of 200dB and it would be 258 million km across, or about the same as the diameter of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
The link budget for bouncing radio signals off the moon (EME) is something like 260 dB. A while ago I had a chance to see the ground station at NASA Goldstone where they manage the radio links to Mars and the outer planets. There was a terminal open with ~single digit bits / second coming in from one of the Voyager probes. Having a 70 meter dish and a cryogenic receiver helps, but the link budget there has got to be truly staggering...
10 dB (deci-Bells) is an order of magnitude ratio; 10 dB = 10Log(10). For non ratios you tack on units, such as 30 dBHz = 10 Log(1 kHz). It just a way of expressing large values in engineering, and you can add the dB instead of multiplying in linear domain. You begin to think in dB after doing it for years.
The path losses stated in the replies are good examples when the rule is broken. The path loss is 22 dB + 20*Log(distance/wavelength). My universe/quark is just a joke of the most extreme ratio I can think of; I’m sure there are others larger.
The national debt ought to be in dB$.