Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 613 posts

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

#461

Post by tboyd47 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #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 t…

This comment is utterly false. Just after a brief glance at the paper, I found a study on showing a 2x increase in cancer on a sample size of over 1,000,000 humans.

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

#462

Post by bufferoverflow »

SigmundA wrote: post #119
Someone1234 wrote: post #62

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…

You're falsely equivocating sun's wide spectrum to 5G's very narrow set of bands. Most of sun's spectrum at the surface is visible, infrared light, and a bit of UV.

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

#463

Post by tezzer »

eytgsf5et wrote: post #267
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…

I find the HN community to be bi-modal with respect to technology: either they are very distrusting (luddites), or blindly in love with it (techno-utopians). 5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.

I work around RF sources professionally. I'm intensely interested in any biological effect of the radiation I work around. I have access to journals through work and my old university, and I read primary sources with great interest (and some knowledge, being an electrical engineer). I have yet to find any credible link between gigahertz RF and health problems (except the neck problems that come from staring at a phone).

I feel like the most damning lack of evidence is the lack of correlation between cell phone adoption and the purported ill effects. In the last 20 years pretty much the whole world started holding RF transmitters up to their head, from basically zero beforehand. If there was an effect, it would be epidemic.

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

#464

Post by rapht »

scotty79 wrote: post #206

The thing is that there's really ton of evidence that non-ionizing radiation is not significantly harmful to humans at levels that don't cook you. If you want to counter that you can't just pile up small studies that might be hinting at possibility that there might be some other effect. You need a smoking gun. Single study, but bulletproof and large, showing strong effect. Everything else will be dismissed as "maybe,…

Agreed in principle, however from what I get :

(i) it seems this "non-ionizing radiation" has many parameters that can modify significantly the way it propagates in the environment (and in human bodies), so I'm not sure speaking of non-ionizing radiation in a general way is sufficient to address the problem

(ii) following this reasoning and your comment about "a single study, bulletproof and large": it does seem that it is in fact what is being asked by this group - that time be given for a meaningful and large study of the specific radiation from 5G tech

and therefore requiring that kind of large study before widespread implementation actually seems warranted.

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

#465

Post by ttgfbvcxgfd »

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.

Sure, ionizing vs non-ionizing but millimeter waves do do localized, penetrating, heating and the intensity of millimeter radiation from 5G is orders of magnitude stronger than that from the Sun.

Is it consequential? Probably not, but the OP's original comparison of 1000 W of Sun vs. 100W from a tower and nW from cell phone is disingenuous.

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

#466

Post by tboyd47 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #443
marcosdumay wrote: post #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 t…

The thing that concerns me about millimeter wave tech and 5G is that it seems like a solution looking for a problem. My city just had a wave of poles dropped in a few neighborhoods, and they seem to me to be an expensive boondoggle. IMO, we would be better served by the heavy hand of the FCC allowing fiber providers to run telephone poles and trenches without any accountability (as the wireless carriers can with 5G).…

It's not a solution looking for a problem. The problem is that the existing infrastructure does not support network slicing. Without network slicing the telcos are severely limited in their pricing models. "5G" is just them trying to convince consumers that this is for their benefit.

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

#467

Post by GrinningFool »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #73
LeonM wrote: 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 (…

On the one hand, I think your conclusion is correct, but on the other hand, it took quite some time to establish the health risks of smoking. Because there were concerted disinformation campaigns etc.

I remember reading Heinlein stories published in the 50s that refer to cigarettes as 'cancer sticks' and 'coffin nails'.

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

#468

Post by Symmetry »

dnautics wrote: post #342
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…

There's plenty of ways that non-ionizing radiation can result in increased cancer rates. For example, they can induce currents in the DNA (DNA is s molecular wire) which might jam the base excision repair system and prevent it from detecting DNA damage (which is a redox-driven process). What's even scarier is that this sort of an effect will not be found in a standard Ames test and also is unlikely to be found in hig…

Wait, so a -30 dBm signal (pretty strong) will induce something like 7mV across a 5 cm antenna. Your cell nuclear is up to 10 microns wide. That's 1.4 microvolts. I'm having a really hard time believing that a 1.4 uV potential across any molecule at STP can have a measurable effect without a lot of energy going into amplifying the signal.

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

#469

Post by tboyd47 »

BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #205
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…

> "Here's a large number of studies saying X" is meaningless in a topic where a very large number of studies have been done. What you need is systematic reviews of the literature that not only count studies, but evaluate their quality and combine their results. The sixth link in the article will get you what you want: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421...

Thank you. The sheer volume of blatantly false comments on this thread is astounding to me.

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

#470

Post by blix »

michaelmrose wrote: post #458
blix wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think modern scientists are a lot less likely to call any empirical relationship a law. Theory is still pretty widely used, and not for things that could be called laws.

You can say the "the theory of quantum chromodynamics," but not "the law of quantum chromodynamics". 'Law' implies a small number of simple equations, while theory allows for a much larger scope of complexity or rigor. The meaning is absolutely different. Modern science is pretty complex compared to what went on 200 years ago, so it's not surprising law has fallen out of favor.

Post reply on HN