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

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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

#451

Post by morpheuskafka »

BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #90

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…

> 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.

I'm not sure exactly what time interval you're making that claim over, but isn't a large part of it people not dying from plague and flu and having good medical care to live into old age in the first place?

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

#452

Post by petre »

nroets wrote: post #279
hannob wrote: post #147

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. People get fooled by "large lists of peer-reviewed publications". Peer review is a lowest level quality mar…

Furthermore, even if cell phones cause cancer then the risk will in all likelihood be so small that it doesn't justify banning the technology. [1] For example, eating barbecued meat causes cancer, but it we don't ban it. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU5XkhUGzBs

Cigarettes and alcohol too. Radiowave effects, even if they do cause anything, are quite easy to mitigate in humans by wearing clothing with carefully positioned electrical conductor insertions.

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

#453

Post by egdod »

jdietrich wrote: post #428
eytgsf5et wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sun is also at 5400K. Therefore, 99.9999038793% of the energy emitted is at wavelengths shorter than 1E-4m (0.1mm). Or, across the entire continuous spectrum (0, 1e-4m] , the total energy from the Sun is 0.0009612W, or 961uW. You might complain that 961 uW is much more than 10nW, but again, you have to consider that 961 uW is across the entire spectrum (0,1E-4]. The Sun is less powerful at narrow spectrums becaus…

>Therefore, 99.9999038793% of the energy emitted is at wavelengths shorter than 1E-4m (0.1mm). Shorter wavelengths have higher photon energy. It's the short stuff that you have to worry about.

As a general heuristic, sure. But that is hardly an airtight thing.

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

#454

Post by pjkundert »

Interesting observations:

- More 5G towers operating in the same frequency/power range as 4G means less RF energy emitting from your Phone to the (now nearer) tower.

- The emissions from the towers to the phones should also be less, because A) they need to emit less energy to reach the (now nearer) handset, and B) the "fountain coding" in 5G means that less data packages need to be transmitted to carry the same data payload as 4G. Of course, this is counterbalanced by the probably higher data usage under 5G.

- Beam-forming millimeter-wave antennas cannot penetrate flesh, so won't try to establish links in that direction. Regular 4G frequencies do (and, use your head as an antenna element). So, transitioning from 4G frequencies to millimeter-wave should reduce the amount of your-head-is-an-antenna utilization for a set amount of data...

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

#455

Post by dekhn »

wongarsu wrote: post #438
magduf wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because you're only exposed to radiation if you actually use a phone. Google for "inverse square law". Your exposure is orders of magnitude lower from "second-hand cellphones" than from using it yourself; it's not like second-hand smoking.

> it's not like second-hand smoking Shouldn't smoke follow the inverse square law as well (in the absence of air currents)?

no. smoke is heavily influenced by ventilation and the enclosure. there's a fair amount of modelling in the literature, for example on how much air flow you would need in confined spaces to reduce secondhand smoke cancer risks to acceptable levels.

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

#457

Post by SigmundA »

eytgsf5et wrote: post #298
SigmundA wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Sun is also at 5400K. Therefore, 99.9999038793% of the energy emitted is at wavelengths shorter than 1E-4m (0.1mm). Or, across the entire continuous spectrum (0, 1e-4m] , the total energy from the Sun is 0.0009612W, or 961uW. You might complain that 961 uW is much more than 10nW, but again, you have to consider that 961 uW is across the entire spectrum (0,1E-4]. The Sun is less powerful at narrow spectrums becaus…

Exactly, the sun is mostly higher energy (approaching ionizing) terahertz radiation.

The concern with 5G seems to revolve around the uses of higher frequency millimeter wave radiation compared to 3G/4G which has shown no repeatable damaging results at normal power levels.

If higher frequency = bad, which is actually true, comparing 5G the sun is not dishonest IMO. I am trying to give some perspective to show how it seems odd to worry about extremely low power cellular radiation while giving little thought to the extremely powerful nuclear radiator in the sky.

Dosage matters, cellular frequency will cook you given enough power, so will visible light. The power levels we are talking about do not generate enough heat to damage our tissue, so if they do harm it would need to be through some other unknown process. Should we keep looking for possible other processes, yes of course. However I would be much more concerned about the much more powerful visible range artificial radiators around us every day, like the monitor I am staring at right now emitting a 100 times the radiation of my cellphone right at my face all day long.

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

#458

Post by michaelmrose »

blix wrote: post #425
michaelmrose wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the difference between law and theory is nothing whatsoever.

There is a substantial difference in my opinion. Laws rarely put forward a mechanism or seek a complete understanding of a relationship, while theories often do. Ohm's law was a law long before the electron was discovered. It's an emperical linear relationship that just seemed to work. Since no mechanism is suggested, it's not possible to determine whether ohmic behavior is expected or not. In contrast, The Drude Mod…

Have you noticed that nothing is called a law anymore? It's a difference in word choice not meaning.

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

#459

Post by Symmetry »

hannob wrote: post #448
manifestsilence wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment explains precisely why the dismissal from so many here. Correlational studies without a plausible causal mechanism are highly suspect. As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming. Unless a 5G study specifically addresses the mechanism, and how non-ionizing radiation can cause da…

> As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming. Actually you got that wrong. This was related to real piracy (i.e. people with eye patches on ships robbing other ships) which went down, not software piracy. So the decline of pirates is related to global warming. (The example came from Bobby H…

There are actually a lot more of the traditional maritime pirates these days operating off the Somali coast than there were in 1919.
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