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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”

#521

Post by Gnarl »

Junk_Collector wrote: post #519
Gnarl wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and also this: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914

Your first link was paywalled so I couldn't read it, but the potential issues with meta-analysis papers has been discussed to death already. The article you linked second, is interesting. He makes some bad claims (The electric fields produced by muscles are strongly polarized contrary to his claim that they are unpolarized) and there is some questionable math, but what I really want to highlight is how he uses the pu…

Oops, didn't realize 1st paper had been paywalled. Try here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative...

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

#522

Post by pcnix »

StavrosK wrote: post #500
lolc wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In darkness our eyes can easily detect a 1W LED from kilometers away.

But can they distinguish a specific 300 mW LED in a stadium with tens of thousands of other LEDs next to it?

If it were a different color, yes. If each of them were a different color, your eye would still be able to, as long as you had enough focus. So the analogy holds pretty well.

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

#523

Post by floriol »

lucideer wrote: post #322
zeleza wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the link is "weak to non-existent" and our a priori thinking is that it should be perfectly safe, shouldn't we default to it being safe? I'm not against also running studies to make sure we haven't missed something, but this seems like an unfair standard that we don't apply to other forms of things we expect to be safe a priori.

> our a priori thinking is that it should be perfectly safe What a bizarre statement. I'm curious where you get this notion that things are perfectly safe a priori. What examples do you have where this has been the case? X-ray? Asbestos? Cigarette smoke? Freon? Lead? Certainly they're evidence of things that were accepted as such.

We are talking about a form of energy which is other than being omnipresent naturally, was studied extensively for more than 100-150 years - including health hazards when it comes to ionising radiation.

While I do think that studies should be continued for a more definitive answer, and I personally don't feel a strong need for a 5G network as of now, I am more on the defaults to safe side.

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

#524

Post by pas »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #368
pas wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microwaves are around 2.4G yet they can pump a lot of energy into water, and that can be an unintended side effect with WiFi. Of course that's one thing that we know about, we can reason about, and that's why people are not getting boiled.

Yes, wattage matters. The comment you responded to covered that. > the wattage of a human at rest is 100W which is roughly equivalent.

I was more referring to energy density and total energy density over time. Also absorption patterns and penetration depth.

We know these pretty well, but they are not trivial (due to non-linearity creeping in).

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

#525

Post by shpongled »

dekhn wrote: post #507
shpongled wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a biochemist, I just want to chime in that I think part of the reason for an apparent increase rise in cancer rates is that we have eliminated many other causes of death already - we have to die of something, and cancer is something that is not "curable" in the sense of other disorders. After looking at the list of publications purported to be evidence, I have to agree with the other comments here casting doubt. M…

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I have worked with world-class scientists where the author only had a gmail address (untill we gave them an appointment at Berkeley).

Of course, a gmail address in and of itself is not an indicator of quality, however on a single author paper it certainly makes me wary.

Just out of curiosity, what field was that in? I could certainly see some scientific disciplines having unaffiliated world-class scientists, but others it would be virtually impossible to do high quality research outside of a lab

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

#526

Post by carapace »

katmannthree wrote: post #511
carapace wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first, I was responding to OP's complaint that the article "supports the author's point of view and offering no opposing points of view. This is not journalism." by pointing out that, in fact, it's not journalism, it's opinion. Second, the whole reason articles like this get published and read is that, in this case, one man's "alarmism" or "deception" or "paranoia" is another man's sober scientific caution. It'…

>Well, first, I was responding to OP's complaint that the article "supports the author's point of view and offering no opposing points of view. This is not journalism." by pointing out that, in fact, it's not journalism, it's opinion. I understand the distinction, but posting dubious opinion articles on news sites is still problematic. The Scientific American does not host articles espousing racist ideologies / vehem…

Cheers! I really appreciate your reply. Personally, I hate e.g. those "magic medallions" that are supposed to "absorb" EM and the like, but I'm not yet convinced that bathing our cities with EM is going to turn out to have zero health side-effects. In any event, the issue should be settled scientifically, eh? I was surprised to see this on SciAm's website, FWIW.

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

#527

Post by Qwertystop »

I would think the more important safety risk from 5G would be that it's going to cause interference with weather-forecast satellites.

A small increase in cancer incidence seems like less of a danger than hurricane path predictions being off by 300 miles less than a week out (https://hackaday.com/2019/04/16/5g-buildout-likely-to-put-we... and many others)

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

#528

Post by mcguire »

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).…

"These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public."

I wouldn't be. To a good first-order approximation, the military doesn't give a hoot about long term health consequences and wouldn't release any such studies, if any were made, unless they indicated a requirement for the military usage to change.

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

#530

Post by FlorianRappl »

swalsh wrote: post #347
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 (…

5G is also fundamentally different in one important way. We are moving a way from fewer high powered towers, to a lot more low powered cells. Yes this existed in 4G, but 5G is taking it to the next level.

I couldn't agree more.

What I find particularly troubling: 4G is for me already more than good enough. 5G is really not so well thought out. They require a lot more cells. The exposure is much higher... They cost more (?).

Why are we having this technology?

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