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

blogs.scientificamerican.com

601–610 of 613 posts

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

#601
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?

My understanding is that healthy human eyes are able to detect individual photons.

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

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Likewise! I appreciate your willingness to discuss this. I was also surprised to see it on their website, surprised and disappointed. The Scientific American used to produce wonderful articles and project guides, and I credit them with having helped jumpstart my love for technology. It is sad to see them publish low quality articles. I understand your hesitation with regard to increasing the invisible radiation flux.…

I agree, Scientific American must be feeling the hurt but I don't want them to, uh, dilute their brand.

In re: EM, I have a better-than-average layman's understanding, but I'm certainly no expert. The specific thing that concerns me is the interaction of lots of sources with the urban environment. One or a few transmitters might be safe in the lab for N years' exposure, but dozens of transmitters operating in an environment with all kinds and shapes of metal and plastic and stone/concrete could conceivably lead to transients that have (relatively) severe side-effects.

I think, with examples like lead in gasoline and asbestos in insulation, etc., that we should be more cautious than we have been in the past. Especially when a given technology is more a marginal than a vital improvement to our lives.

In any event, you bring up a very good point: "... I would be far more worried about the materials used to produce modern phones and the disposal of the resulting industrial waste, ..." Indeed, there are a lot of problems "in line" before you get to "Cellphones gave me cancer!".

Cheers! Well met.

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

#603
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Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#604

Interestingly, this is apparently a story that a lot of Russian troll farms are pushing hard at the moment.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, and please especially don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#605
post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation is not an excuse to completely ignore findings either. As the original study said: more data/analysis is needed.

Never implied that. The study of radar operators in the military specifically states that the cancer could be caused by anything, calling out industrial solvents often used when servicing radar equipment. But the “5G is cancer” people use the study to support their claim that millimetre saves cause cancer.

The radar operators surely don’t wash them every day with “industrial solvents”. It’s nowhere said that there’s any basis that the operators are consistently exposed to them. The study also doesn’t claim what you claim, it is written much more carefully.

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

#606

I'd be interested in seeing signatures from people at institutions I recognize and trust. There are a lot of people with degrees FROM credible institutions, but very little in terms of currently being researchers in the field AT credible institutions. It's not hard to find 250 wackos if you pull random scientists working in random fields at random institutions. Most have no better way to know safety of 5G than I do.…

The scientists' appeal, including a list of signatories and their affiliations, isn't hard to find by following links. https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal Likewise for a list of relevant papers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl... Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust? Columbia? Monash? McGill? Can we dispense with the tired ad hominems and ta…

... I found them, and that's exactly what raised flags.

If a faculty at HMS signed on, that'd be okay. If a ransom person with a degree from HMS does, that doesn't carry the same weight. I was pretty clear about "at" versus "from."

Science isn't a democracy.

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

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Energy doesn't scale with distance in that way, with quantum mechanics. A "mismatch in size" (roughly speaking) will result in a different quantum efficiency, not a lowered energy, and also keep in mind that DNA is a highly coiled molecule so the resonance frequency could be deceptive. The straightened length of DNA in a cell is on the length order of meters. (Though that doesn't mean that it will resonate with meter long waves, it will have a higher efficiency with wavelengths much longer than a micron)

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

#608
post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it doesn't seem unreasonable to start with the assumption that something is unsafe and work to prove that it is safe. Seems safer ;) If this was some technology where not having it would be a major impediment to society, then maybe it would be a different story. But 5G just doesn't seem that important to me.

If we were to do this, it would cause large numbers of techologies to never ever reach the public because people couldn't do the work to "prove" that something is safe. I would only recommend this policy towards things that we could reasonably expect to have catastrophic outcomes.

Like I said, the reason it seems reasonable in this case is because 5G really just doesn't seem like it's super important. The telcos just need a new thing to market, and it seems totally reasonable for us to expect them to ensure it's safe, especially give the ubiquity of cell phones and the fact that most people will probably eventually be upgraded to 5G without even needing to opt in.

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

#609

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…

Funny things start to happy on online discussion boards when billions of dollars are at stake. Comments deserve as much skepticism as the headline.

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

#610
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really comparable (especially to the 5G technologies). Given their size, radio waves go right over us.

No, they are not. If they were to go 'right over us', we wouldn't be able to receive the radio station.

The spectrum known as radio waves are anywhere from 10 to 100,000 meters long. 4 average size humans can fit inside the length of the smallest radio wave.
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