If A affects B without being right next
to it,
then the effect in question must be indirect — the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A
to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception
to this
intuition — say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but
then we realize that this happens through wires) or
listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but
then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)-- it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception.