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“We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

blogs.scientificamerican.com

161–170 of 613 posts

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#161
post #87
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cert in homeopathy would not be like certifying in AWS or Azure products. It would be like having a CS degree and then getting a cert in computer shamanism where you were trained in the proper chants and symbology to fix computers just by shouting at them. Equating certifying in a stack or methodology like AWS or Azure with homeopathy lends it 1000X more credit than it deserves. By all means certify in herbology or…

And so a medically sick person who insists on (or at least is very much more comfortable with) a homeopathy-certified doctor should be denied a medically (and surgically) qualified doctor?

Yes. Next question.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#162

I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with links to the original publications themselves. Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call…

> more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields"

Those 240 scientist have not published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields"

They are mostly experts in other fields.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It comes down to a persons personal risk. [..] Wear a hat and sunscreen. What's the "hat and sunscreen" protection against millimeter wave cellphone towers, that someone else installed on their private property near you? I'm not yet convinced the risks exist. But conceptually if there was a danger, there's no "personal risk" argument. We're blanketing the whole area around a tower with millimeter wave/5G, a person…

The sun is a 1000 watts per square meter exposure at your body, cell towers might be 100w if you hugged the antenna then inverse square law to distance to about 0.00000001 watt with a strong signal. Your cell device is a millwatts transmitter, equivalent to an LED light shining on you. You don't need hat and sunscreen for street lights or flashlights nor would you need it for cellular power levels, orders of magnitud…

This is a tangent, but it's crazy that we've built a communications network that relies on basically LEDs shining out of our pockets (with less interference from the sun, but still).

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#164
post #109
post #45

With every new generation of cellular technology, this question comes up. This started as early as CT, then DECT, GSM, 3G, 4G and now 5G. After 30+ years of having consumer grade wireless telephony we are still debating whether the radio signals have any negative effect on living beings. If we can't draw any conclusion from a sample size that big, then I must conclude that the effects of EM-radiation are so minimal (…

> I must conclude that the effects of EM-radiation are so minimal Cancer rates are rising and we're not sure why. Is that acceptable?

There are quite a few obvious reasons why cancer rates are rising.

* People get older

* Cancer detection is improving

* Cancer mortality is sinking

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#165

Yeah. HackerNews is your local city's subreddit now. Agree - very sad.

Quote from a comment that just got posted by Hannob:

"I clicked on a few links and Googled a few names. It's roughly what I'd expect: People with few publications now working in other fields, people without scientific publications, but university degrees, people who regularly speak at events from radiation critics, people who are invested in other fringe theories."

Seems to me that the people complaining about people not clicking on links in the article shouldn't believe everything they read without checking who wrote it...

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.

Unfortunately the hunch you have just spendt 30 seconds thinking about is sadly incorrect. The increase in life expectancy doesn't account for the increased incidence of cancers. There are other factors at play, which need to be investigated (some that we know: obesity, pollution, cigarettes).

I would add sleep deprivation to your list.

We live in an increasingly sleepless society and lack of sleep is effectively a carcinogen.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#168
post #87
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cert in homeopathy would not be like certifying in AWS or Azure products. It would be like having a CS degree and then getting a cert in computer shamanism where you were trained in the proper chants and symbology to fix computers just by shouting at them. Equating certifying in a stack or methodology like AWS or Azure with homeopathy lends it 1000X more credit than it deserves. By all means certify in herbology or…

And so a medically sick person who insists on (or at least is very much more comfortable with) a homeopathy-certified doctor should be denied a medically (and surgically) qualified doctor?

They should not be denied anything, but no self-respecting medical doctor should get a certification in homeopathy just because there is a market for it. That just adds legitimacy to it and keeps the wheel spinning.

I would not get a certification in computer shamanism, even if it made my clients feel better about me when I mumbled the Old Tongue and clapped my hands above their laptop. If this was something people wanted, I'm sure others with more compromised morals would be happy to set up a certification board and oblige.

I have no ill feelings towards those that believe that computers or human bodies are magic. This is not their fault. I have no respect for professionals that are complicit in this. Shame on them. They are one short step away from professionally proscribing homeopathy because it "makes the client feel better, so the ends justify the means".

Hey, some people believe the placebo pill is ethical. I believe it violates the letter and spirit of informed consent. I feel the same about homeopathy. Homeopathy is bunk no matter how a sick person or salesman or doctor feels about it.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#169
Honestly, after a glance at the links, they don't inspire confidence in me either. There are papers about very small changes on very rare types of cancer, measured by proxy on a species where it's common; papers criticizing the critics claiming association with interested parties (what is a perfectly fine thing to claim, but what is it doing in a scientific paper?); and the only wide review I could find claims that the literature has very weak conclusions that are not sufficient to claim any danger.

As usual, it's not the scientists that are wackos, it's the press that is claiming things completely different from what they say. There are proposals for better test equipment that should be taken, but I don't see any other claim for change there.

> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.

The wildest of the claims anywhere on the linked papers is a ~10% increase on the rate of one of the rarest types of cancer, so this line of research won't give you the answers you are looking for.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#170
post #96
post #63

In such matters, there's a strong psychological bias from tech-savvy people to dismiss evidence and side with the technology (not the science, which would include estimation of potential harm etc, but with the technological application, which is assumed as de facto good). It's a strong self-identification with technology who instills a fear of appearing as a luddite, like the unwashed masses who fear this or that and…

Hm. Sure, some people just point to how the same thing happened with GSM, 2G, 3G, 4G, WiFi... but that's just a fallacy, because we also know that gamma rays, X-rays and UV are harmful, so deductively there must be some grey zone between 3G and hard gamma rays. Since we can't simply infer the health effects with certainty from first principles (let's say from physics/chemistry) we should demand relevant data. But we…

Visible light is between 3G and gamma rays. Gama rays are dangerous because they can yank electrons out of atoms and thus change their chemical makeup.
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