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 cannot opt out.

You don't need hat and sunscreen for street lights or flashlights nor would you need it for cellular power levels, orders of magnitude difference in exposure.

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 because otherwise it'd drown out the cell phone tower (Or rather we pump power into the antenna to overcome the "noise" from the Sun).

I'd reproduce the numbers, but unfortunately my HP48 underflows at such narrow bandwidths.

And the "LED" at your face is, of course, much more powerful than the Sun since (as you pointed out) by the inverse square law, it has to pump out a lot of power to reach the tower.

Nor do I happen to think LEDs are harmless. Using LEDs to affect biological system is a very rich area of study.

Do I think non-ionizing radiation is harmful? I doubt it. But comparing a 1000W/m^2 @ 5400K black body radiator to a cell phone tower is dishonest.

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.

Shorter wavelengths have higher photon energy. It's the short stuff that you have to worry about.

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.

A simple power comparison is not a great measure of affect.

The problem with every argument about radiation from cell phones being dangerous is that for every proposed mechanism, the Sun is orders of magnitude more damaging.

The obvious worries with cell phones are repeated stress injuries, insomnia and disruption of personal relationships. There's just no plausible mechanism for the radiation to be damaging, though.

Extremely tiny exposure of non ionizing radiation, you probably get more from the monitor your looking at right now.

Ultimately this isn't simply an issue of "personal risk." If there's no danger, there's no danger. But if there is and you live in a major city simply not owning a cellular device may only lower your exposure.

(Yes, they're not zero: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0029/44876/m... )

And in either way - more towers, less power per tower.

You make it sound like EM waves aren’t being emitted or reflected by everything in the universe short of a black hole.

And cell phone EM exposure levels for someone who isn’t carrying a phone - hopefully this person knows better than to walk outside, or stand near a window!

Right besides the tower you're in a blind spot, then it gets more intense as you move out of the blind spot and then it gets lower as you move further away.

> 5G will require cell antennas every 100 to 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation. 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO) which pose unique challenges for measuring exposures.

It can use more towers at higher frequencies in really really crowded areas or industrial setups, but those work at lower power outputs, and penetrate the body less (due to higher frequencies).

Now compare to AM/FM transmitters that cover a huge geographic area. Those can be scary. FCC allows up to 50000 W transmission power. It's required because the antennas are spaced so far apart.

I think when comparing this to the sun there are lots of things worth considering from many different angles.

1. To say this threat is nothing compared to the risks we face from the sun, completely ignores the fact that we have millions of years of evolutionary exposure to sunlight and because of that fact the immune system has become way more acclimated to dealing with it's carcinogenic properties. Of course, our immune systems aren't perfect but considering how much more exposure we all are to sunlight than any other carcinogen, if we didn't have a strong evolutionary tolerance to it; melanoma would obviously be the #1 leading cause of cancer. But it's not.

Now in hindsight, what we don't have evolutionary genetic tolerance for is microwave radiation. While i'm not in anyway an expert in biology or the physics of light, I do have enough insight to know that we should never underestimate the possible negative outcome of any potential problem when it's still just a mathematical theory we're playing with rather than a reality of nature we're all dying from.

I mean, we underestimate and miscalculate these kind of things all the time and it's kind of counter productive that the answer to the question of "When will we learn to stop doing this?" is always "Once, we underestimate and miscalculate, discover our error and become smarter because of it"...

2. The bigger issue this has when compared to the sun is the fact that all of us can agree while there is such a thing as getting too much sun. However, there isn't such a thing as internet that is too fast. We essentially all want to be able to download terabytes at the speed of light so that we can one day be on Mars and be able to seamlessly stream Netflix from Earth while were up there. And while of course there is a speed of light limitation of like i believe 8 minutes, that doesn't mean people aren't going to complain why they cant instantly stream from there.

This is what we need to understand about this issue. There is no limitation to how much radio wave radiation we want when we are thinking of that radiation in the language of the internet, as "Content".

3. When it comes to protecting ourselves from this, if it actually does turn out to be a substantial problem. All the solutions suck.

The radio wave EM shielding for example protects you from the potentially harmful waves. But it also creates like I said, a deadzone.

So putting it in your walls of your home, because you don't want you and your entire family constantly being exposed to the cell tower that might only be a football field length away from your house (as the one near my house is), also means you can't receive or make calls to and from your cell phone. This is a deal breaker for most people, and as far as i'm aware RF shielding isn't like sunscreen where it blocks out most of the harmful light while letting in the some you want. It's an all or nothing solution.

Which is why I think putting the RF shield in clothing like a hoodie would be an interesting venture idea. The shielding protects your body, while your phone is still outside of the shielded area. (although this obviously doesn't protect your face and i don't think RF shielded masks are going to find a market other than antifa)

And another reason why the implications of this would really suck, is that it means were stuck with crappy wires and the companies who own the rights to pumping internet to and fro over them. I am mostly looking forward to 5G because I view it as the primary means we are going to get ourselves out of the era of shitty slow internet and greedy cable company overlords who wouldn't know how to disrupt something if a tv with rainbow bars on the screen hit them in the face.

Nor would such a thing be possible unless we could somehow drastically reduce our water content.

But speaking of miscalculation, mentioning Mars before starting to go on about tinfoil hoodies is, well, there's a lot of actually definitely dangerous radiation on Mars and a whole lot more on the way there.

One last note, higher speed or bandwidth has not scaled linearly (or really at all, outside early 3g?) with antenna power.

But if you do want to shield your house, most telcos offer seamless wifi calling these days. Then again wifi runs on the same freq as microwave ovens.