Are you talking about health effects?

I don't have a study on hand but I expect the effect to be less than lower frequency waves.

First thing to get out of the way, these are not ionizing radiation. Basically, the only thing electromagnetic waves up to visible light can do is heat. UV is borderline.

The question is what they heat. The general idea is that the lower the wavelength, the deeper the penetration. 2/3/4G frequencies will heat your insides, 50 GHz will only heat your skin. Of course the power is so that under normal conditions, the heating is negligible.

As for the effect of millimeter waves, while testing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System they subjected people to massive (100kW!) doses of 95 GHz radiation. High enough to actually burn you, and yet, the adverse effects were minimal.

If you are talking about technical problems, like interference, and how to deal with radio waves that are starting to act a bit like light. I guess that 5G is designed by people who know what they are doing. Simply that we are able to make it work is almost like a miracle to me.

Human health would be the first thing on my mind, but there are many other things it could have an effect on - everything from the neighborhood pigeons to trees.

And yes, I am sure that 5G is designed by some brilliant people. Anyone getting that close to the Shannon limit is smarter than me. My hat is off to them.

But the reality is that this stuff just hasn't been trialed in any real way. Sure, the US government found 600 adults to get zapped for a few hours and only injured eight of them. But how about living with it for ten years? What about different frequencies? 100 nm is a world away from 300nm which is a world away from 500nm. Sure, they trialed 95 GHz and it was fine. What about 48 GHz? 25 GHz? All the other frequencies being used? What about with 256 antennae transmitting at higher power than anything before, right next to you, day in and day out for a decade?

One big claim is that all this 5G radiation is blocked by the skin, so we'll all be fine! Oh wait, what about babies? Turns out babies' skin is thin enough that mm waves can penetrate the dermis...

Furthermore, ionizing radiation and heating are not the only two ways EM can harm you. Just look at all the news about blue light for one example! EM radiation in the mm-wave range is still far understudied compared to the cm wave range.

Look, I think that 5G is probably going to be fine, health wise. But for something as big as this, it absolutely deserves at least one good longitudinal study. Of which there have been zero.

Just to let you know, your arguments make sense to me and it is nice to see that not all "anti-5G" people are scientifically illiterate conspiracy theorists. No coronavirus in your argument, good ;)

I still respectfully disagree, but that's more because I trust the experts who designed and authorized 5G deployment, including regulations on transmit power than because of extensive knowledge on my part. The risk is never zero, but I think it is low enough for immediate deployment.

The EM spectrums are already nearly full - is that not proof in itself?

On top of that the military uses absolutely enormous energies in their RADARs and there's still little if any evidence of risk even including powers where you might as well have you head in a microwave oven

>> The EM spectrums are already nearly full - is that not proof in itself?

... What? I have no idea what "full" would be, but by any definition they are certainly not. Just a bit of air is enough to attenuate mm waves of even high power. (That's why we need so many towers!) There is not a lot of ionizing radiation out there, that's why we're not all dead (and why x-ray film even works.)

Maybe you're thinking of outer space? But it's not even true there - for an obvious example, visible light, which there is very little of by human standards pretty much everywhere in the universe.

"The military used it for some time and nobody died so let's put it pointing everywhere in our homes and offices" strikes me as a very weak argument for something's safety. As just a simple counterexample for why you cannot use that to demonstrate safety, consider that while mmwaves do not penetrate the adult human dermis, babies' skin is thinner and is easily penetrated by mmwaves.

The electromagnetic spectrum is in use pretty much everywhere someone can build a radio to operate on that frequency.

> "The military used it for some time and nobody died so let's put it pointing everywhere in our homes and offices"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fylingdales

This is a 2.5MW Phased Array. If there was any provable health risks to these (there are ~10 of them in the west) we would know - there have been suspicions, but they have been investigated and no evidence has been found.

Why do we care about microwaves in particular when there are huge installations like these operating at much longer wavelengths which as you say penetrate further?

If there was immediate danger from electromagnetic radiation it would have been observed years ago - powerful microwave emitters have been in use in very proximity to humans since the second world war (Randall and Boot developed their magnetron in 1940)

I have quite a few of the papers that 5G nuts cite, and they are not convincing in this slightest - there is not a single paper that is both dealing with radiation within FCC limits, on animal test subjects, and have any macroscopic threat to health. This also doesn't include the issue that these papers are usually reports of fairly limited research so there is no discussion of the relative risk of their findings if there are any at all (Historical Evidence as mentioned previously sets an upper bound on that risk too).

>> The electromagnetic spectrum is in use pretty much everywhere someone can build a radio to operate on that frequency.

Well, first of all, "the electromagentic spectrum" is "in use" everywhere in the universe, and includes things like radios and the sun. What I think you meant to imply is that humans have been living with mm-waves before for extended periods of time. Which is absolutely false. The problem is that mm-waves are attenuated by air, or clothing, or buildings, or the atmosphere, or what have you. There are some mm-wave sources that humans have messed around with, but always for short durations (usually on the order of hours/days) and nearly always with a strongly attenuated signal (air, cars, buildings in the way.)

The reality is that no group of humans have ever lived their normal lives with a mm-wave source, period. The closest you can get is police speed guns, the vast majority of which are in the 10-25 mW range at 10-35 GHz. They are pointed away from the user; either you're the cop aiming them at someone, or you're the person in the car being tracked (if you're in the car, 35 GHz won't penetrate.) Even if you're a cop that decided to just point the radar gun at your face 40hr/week for ten years, that's far, far less exposure than someone living in a city equipped with 5G.

So nobody's lived their lives with a mm-wave source, OK. In order for mm-waves to ever actually get -to- your body, you would have to propose a new massively expensive system deploying massive amounts of unprecedented power mm-wave radios closer to humans than ever before: in other words, 5G.

>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fylingdales (and the rest of your comment)

Come on, that's completely different from what we're talking about here - that's a centimeter wave system. Humans have lived with the presence of centimeter waves for a while, and we are fairly sure they're safe. Cell phones, microwave ovens, RC cars, everything uses centimeter waves.

>> I have quite a few of the papers that 5G nuts cite, and they are not convincing in this slightest

Well, I'd like to point out I'm not a 5G nut. I typically don't bother clicking on those weird rabbit holes of conspiracy blogs tied together with red string based on some inconclusive data. I'm also not saying 5G is dangerous. I simply believe it's unknown. We simply do not know, as a species, what living our lives bombarded with unprecedented amounts of mm-waves will do, as nobody has done it before. Likely it will be harmless; however, there is a chance it will not be. As with many things, it may be the cumulative dose over many years that is harmful.

> Well, I'd like to point out I'm not a 5G nut

I wasn't accusing you. They're usually well-meaning rather than overly conspiratorial - although there are a few near me who, let's just say don't mention the Rothschild family near them.

In line with your final paragraph I suppose I agree that we don't know for sure, but it's unlikely.

As to high frequency radio waves specifically, Fighter aircraft have had millimetre band radars which people have worked with for half a century at least now (along with microwave links in the cities and satellite links etc.).

I feel like it's important to point out that long term exposure can't be too long term in the sense that the phenomenon has to be weak enough to have not yet been observed yet strong enough to outpace the churning of biological material in effects.

As a final remark, here is some actual data about 5G exposure in relation to local limits (UK in this case) i.e. fractions of a percent of the ICNIRP guidelines at most. Also, no one I'm aware of has proposed a mechanism as to why the wavelength matters at this scale?

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/190005/...

> they subjected people to massive (100kW!) doses of 95 GHz radiation. High enough to actually burn you, and yet, the adverse effects were minimal.

And yet a domestic microwave at 800W is enough to both burn the skin in minutes and cause nerve cell damage in few seconds.

Ok, so, for one, you're miss-understanding the MIMO designation, or at least miss-representing it's meaning. 128x128 means that both sender and receiver have 128 antennas. Not that it's an array of 128 * 128 antennas (16384).

Also, the 128x128 5G MIMO deployments I could find were distributed deployments, placing remote radio heads very densely at relevant indoor locations. I assume they're referring to places like large train stations or shopping malls.

Also, regarding the "massive amounts" part: there is little incentive to transmit more than a few hundred mW per channel, just because the mobile device needs to transmit at a similar level anyways, and there are battery and cooling considerations, even neglecting the cost of power amplifiers for these frequencies.

And, the 1 million devices per square kilometer is actually just a dense, standing crowd. It's the average density that can be reached over any sizable area (putting a school class's phones in a box until the end of the lesson would imply some insane density in that box, but there'd be a limit for how many boxes could be arranged into a dense grid).

As the HN guidelines say, "Assume good faith."

I understand the MIMO designation, and I am not trying to misrepresent it in my comment. I know that 128x128 is not sixteen thousand (!!!) antennas on one tower, but rather 256, half for rx and half for tx.

That said, two hundred and fifty six antennae on one tower is far, far more (orders of magnitude, plural!) than the typical 2x2 or 4x4 4G towers deployed today. And keep in mind that this is certainly not "just" 256 antennae for one mall, because 5G is blocked by anything thicker than a post-it (the article mentions how future plans include deploying massive MIMO to each floor of a building, as drywall and glass both block many 5G frequencies!)

The reality is that no matter how you want to slice it, 5G means moving from widely spaced 4G towers transmitting at frequencies we have used for around a century to hyper-dense massive deployments of large numbers of antennae transmitting at new and relatively un-studied frequencies. 4G towers are (mostly) kept away from humans getting too close; 5G towers will be on lampposts and on the same floor of your office where someone can touch them.

I'm not saying 5G is inherently bad, or good, I have no idea. I haven't run a longitudinal study, but _neither has anyone else_, and that's what scares me a little. Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco.

And sure, transmit power is low. But it's not just about the power. Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body. Then I accidentally looked at the source, which hurt my eyes and disoriented me. Later I played with a device of only 0.01W emitting highly temporally coherent EM radiation. I had to put on safety equipment, because it had the possibility to harm me, including permanently damaging my sight.

Lots of work has already been carried out.

I think you misunderstand the concept of directional beamforming. The antennas in question in a phased array are 'elements' that cooperate to steer a more focussed beam in a given direction.

The phone in your pocket when transmitting (whether 3G/4G/5G) is the biggest contribution to your personal health. Not a base station.

I'd be concerned much more about low and mid band that can penetrate much further than high band. I am concerned about high band too (skin surface effects) but know nothing about this and assume work has been done to quantify and assess.

My biggest problem both with 5G hype and those that seek to cast doubt on it is that both sides misrepresent the 'facts' to suit their agenda. Sadly that's true in all walks of life.

I've messed around with radio a bit, so I have some idea of beamforming. Basically, you use interference in the wavefront to your advantage. I am not sure what relevance it has here - at the end of the day, you are still dumping lots of power into new and unknown frequencies in every direction, very close to humans.

I am going to disagree with you that the phone is always the bigger risk. Apparently Huawei 5G base stations are above 11 kilowatts, and these are being rolled out closer to humans than ever before.

Sure, some research has been done, but the vast majority of it has been simply pointing some mm-waves at people for a few hours and checking if they're OK afterwards. I haven't seen anything for babies (baby skin is thin enough that mm-waves can go through the dermis, unlike adults) and not even a hint of any quality longitudinal study.

And yes, I agree, the 5G hype/hate is so rabid that it makes it much harder to find any actual science on the internet about the subject. Personally, I don't have any agenda here. I was generally positive on 5G until I read the details in this great and informative article, and thought "wow, that's a lot of antennas, and a lot of new frequencies, and they're closer to us than ever before"

If you know of any decent studies on this, I'm all ears - please drop any links.

Do you have a source for 11 kW base stations?

Assuming we are talking about RF power output here, that is far higher than anything I've ever dealt with, and I'm not sure that it's at all right. A typical macro cell has 20 Watts of RF power output (for example).

The relevant international standards are those from ICNIRP, and they've recently updated and expanded on these in great detail around safety margins of various frequencies.

The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, recently did a safety study of actual deployed equipment, looking at measuring the RF output from base stations.

Therefore I'm not sure where figures like 11 kW are coming from. Maybe there are some very hot (and inefficient) early base stations somewhere using 11 kW of mains power to produce 20 or 40 W of RF energy? But considering Huawei is heavily advertising 5G as being "greener", that wouldn't seem likely either. But even then, this is far higher than even the wall socket consumption of the equipment I've dealt with.

11kW is the figure for power consumption of the entire cell site, not RF output power. The same source gives about 7kW for a current 4G site.

https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-l...

Do keep in mind that those ~20 W typically apply to a single MIMO band (so, 10 W +45 deg linear polarization, 10 W -45 deg linear polarization, for a, say, 120 deg wide and 5-20 deg high sector). One eNodeB can have multiple frequency bands, that are aggregated when communicating with a recent high-end smartphone. Of course this restricts deployments where humans can easily walk up to the antenna, but these power levels are only worth it for long-range scenarios.

The 11 kW seem realistic when you take a multi-sector mast that fills 200 MHz TDD with 1W/Mhz in 3 separate 120 deg sectors (600W), at least once you include the compute to handle aggregate data at a realistic maximum spectral efficiency of ~10 (bit/s)/Hz (6 Gbit/s). These power amplifiers are typically between 10 and 40% efficiency.

11kW in the 1GHz-1THz range, in a location where a civilian bystander could accidentally move himself into the beam, isn't going to happen. Not even 1kW.

If you look at a microwave magnetron (don't), you go blind in seconds from your eyeballs getting cooked and turning opaque. Surgery could theoretically replace them (and leave the retina), but I'm not aware of that ever happening.

It's quite feasible for a sizable eNodeB to consume 11kW, but keep in mind that they have significant amounts of compute hardware.

It'd help if you'd make a bit more of an effort to check/validate/cite the concrete numbers you name, if you don't want to be seen as a "confused anti-5G person". I don't think you are malicious, considering your history, but no everyone will.

> Later I played with a device of only 0.01W emitting highly temporally coherent EM radiation. I had to put on safety equipment, because it had the possibility to harm me, including permanently damaging my sight.

Are you talking about a laser? The mechanism of injury is the same as any RF injury -- localized heating. You stick a soldering iron on your retina, you're going to have permanent damage to your vision. The reason you only need a low power to do damage is because the power is spread out over a very small space, because your cells absorb the energy instead of letting it pass through, and because the retinal cells are extremely sensitive to temperature (a 10C increase is apparently all you need to permanently damage them).

> Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body.

Skin cancer from exposure to sunlight kills people. UV light has enough energy to rip electrons off of atoms in your body, causing much damage. ("Ionizing radiation.") From physics, we know where the boundary between ionizing light and non-ionizing light lies (in the middle of the UV spectrum). We know ionizing radiation is dangerous -- we understand the mechanism and the effects. (Notice how much safety equipment is involved in getting a dental x-ray. Minimum dose required to get the necessary image. The technician stands in a separate room lined with lead. You wear a lead vest to avoid exposure anywhere that's not needed for the image.)

We also know when ionization stops happening. The energy carried by a photon is directly related to the wavelength of the light, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_energy. Below the middle of UV, photons don't have enough energy to ionize anything. Thus begins "non-ionizing radiation", which as far as we know, just burns you. You can, of course, die from burns, so it's not harmless. That is how microwaves cook foods -- water absorbs energy from 2.4GHz photons quite well ("dielectric heating"). The RF energy is converted to heat, and makes you a hot meal. But you sure wouldn't want to have your hand in there when it's on.

Anyway, these effects are well understood. Any "5G is harmful" argument needs to propose a new mechanism for causing damage, or show how a known mechanism works at 5G frequencies. You could show that it turns out we were wrong about ionization (experimentally testable). You could show that certain tissues convert all the energy to heat (again experimentally testable).

Sure, there could be a new mechanism for causing damage that only happens at some random location in the EM spectrum not related to any other effects. Someone has to be the first to discover it. Portal 2 has a good quote: "Marie Curie invented the theory of radioactivity, the treatment of radioactivity, and dying of radioactivity."

It seems unlikely, though. You can do an infinite amount of research without discovering something that doesn't exist. People want fast YouTube downloads more than they want a 0% chance of risk. The risk is already so close to zero that it doesn't matter.

> Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco.

I believe they knew it would make a noise. They just didn't think anyone would care.

A deeper problem is that humans are capable of creating much more complicated systems than nature. Ever debug some code and wonder "how did that ever work?" It's just a lot more complex than basic physics, and so there are a lot more unexpected results.

>> Sure, there could be a new mechanism for causing damage that only happens at some random location in the EM spectrum not related to any other effects. It seems unlikely, though.

And there lies the body of your argument.

Now I will disprove it:

- Photochemically-induced retinal injury (NOT tissue heating) by 430nm EM radiation [1]

- Exposure to ~600 THz EM radiation disrupting the circadian rhythm [2]

- Living within 50m of a <100 kHz EM radiation source more than doubles the chance of Alzheimer's disease [3]

- Spinal cord stimulation at 10 kHz significantly helped chronic pain [4]

[1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-1097....

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4734149/

[3]: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/169/2/167/95445

[4]: https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/article/20/10/1971/541...

The EM spectrum is vast and complex. Deploying unprecedented numbers of towers, each with more antennas, at higher powers than ever before, at new and untested wavelengths [5], strikes me as risky. You may, of course, draw your own conclusion. As with many technological improvements, we may not know the true cost for many years to come.

[5]: from the above article - up to 2 orders of magnitude more antennas per tower, orders of magnitude more towers, power significantly higher than before, and 48 GHz.

> Exposure to ~600 THz EM radiation disrupting the circadian rhythm [2]

You see, if you hadn't switched the units around, this would have been a good example. But I'm failing at searching a way for how this could have been deliberate, yet non-malicious.

Also, 10kHz is something you get with modern power electronics, not RF. Take a look at the way they couple that energy into the subject, and what the power levels are.

Can you please give a concrete citation for the power being "significantly higher than before"?

There are some interesting radio transmissions in the ~10kHz region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency

I am not sure how these signals come from power lines, which is what the study looks at. I would assume those are in the 50-60Hz range. (But we can use that band for communication too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency)

Well, keep in mind that the Swiss 50Hz do fall into the <100kHz designation.

I'm aware of it's usage for pinging currently-diving submarines, and in the slightly higher region, providing wireless bidirectional low-bandwidth comms into deep mines. The power lines do have quite some magnetic stray fields, though. Not that it's too massive; it's not more than a few (3~4) kA at most.

Wow, you are really struggling with the whole "Assume good faith" thing.

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

Here's a helpful link. HN can be a great place full of interesting people, but you really do have to assume good faith.

Look, I came into this discussion trying to have an intelligent discussion about the possibile risks of 5G. When I opened the article I was somewhat positive about 5G, now I am somewhat negative. I am not some crackpot saying it will damn us to Hell eternally, I'm saying hey, we've messed around with novel parts of the EM spectrum before, why not at least evaluate the risks first? Never before in human history has anyone lived with a mmwave source, and now we are planning to roll them out at unprecedented speed to all the world's cities without a single longitudinal study on the risks.

I've been playing with different ways to represent things partly for fun, and partly as a filter for this discussion. Anyone who can't trivially figure out that 1 Hz ~= a wavelength of 299792 km does not have the knowledge necessary for this discussion.

Tens and hundreds of kHz RF has been created by humans. The first of studies have been coming out in the last decade about its effects. So far, it looks like living within 50m more than doubles your risk of Alzheimer's.

>> Can you please give a concrete citation for the power being "significantly higher than before"?

Sure. Both MTN and Huawei say that just with current systems we're looking at 200-300% of existing levels. And it's their job to make it sound -good-.

https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-l...

That link is talking about total power used by the entire site, not RF power emitted. A lot of that is going into things like additional switching capacity, advanced FPGA and DSP hardware, etc. Also, it is additive on top of older cell technology (look at the graph) - it makes sense that power consumption will go up at a site supporting 2G/3G/4G and 5G, instead of just 2/3G or 2/3/4G.

I'm sorry for not seeing

> and partly as a filter for this discussion

coming. As I said earlier, I am not assuming bad faith from you in this discussion, but didn't see a good reason for mixing these up. It made me consider whether you might have soaked those numbers from popular media or (worse) echo chambers.

I guess it's just another example for sarcasm/humor causing problems on the internet, but this time making me worry whether you got captured by some echo chamber, instead of making the sarcastic author look like a troll.

And, just to note, I personally try hard to not behave badly on HN, so feel free to assume a misunderstanding instead of me assuming/exhibiting bad faith.

The first two links are about blue light affecting your eyes. Indeed there are many light inputs that affect your eyes. You have to understand that the cells in your eye are uniquely tuned to produce a chemical response to light. That's what seeing is. One also cannot discount the effects of your brain's interpretation of various light sources -- there are lots of horrific images that you can see, but the brain damage doesn't come from a reaction to the energy in the radiation, it's from your interpretation of what you're watching.

The next link suggests an increase in Alzheimer's disease from living near power lines. I am not sure how meaningful the results are; the entire document is caveats on how they selected which data points to use, the field strenghts are vastly different from wireless signals, and the frequency ranges are off by 5 orders of magnitude.

The last link is about a device designed to receive radio signals and apply electrical current to your spinal cord. If the radio waves worked by themselves, why would they implant a receiver?

You latch on to the "large number of antennas" thing, but it's not really a big deal. All the antenna array does is create interference patterns that control the direction of the signal. The antennas are excited with the desired signal with different phase delays, and then the interference results in some spots receiving 0 power (in an ideal case) and another spot receiving all the power. A friend of mine wrote a small simulation you can play with in your browser: https://apenwarr.ca/beamlab/. (The reality is that channel capacity depends on SNR, and while these do increase the signal strength at the receiver, they more importantly reduce the amount of noise that reaches the receiver. It is easier to null out received noise in a certain direction than to transmit power somewhere.)

In the past, we did this with carefully placed antenna elements that receive and re-radiate signals from another antenna element: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagi%E2%80%93Uda_antenna (among many other designs). Now that DSP has become more powerful, it is possible to do it in software instead of hardware, and get better results. (Phased array radar have existed since the 70s. WiFi and 4G networks also use MIMO.)

I guess my summary continues to be: some sort of mechanism of causing damage will have to be proposed and tested. Maybe things on the very low end are bad (as your study [3] suggests). We know things on the high end are bad (don't get too many x-rays). But those effects roll off, and 5G is in an area where those effects probably don't exist.

Anywhere current flows through a conductor, radio waves follow. We have been using radio for 100 years, and we kind of know how this stuff works. I don't think there is any reason to worry (and many experts in medicine and RF agree with me).

Your microwave uses 2.4 GHZ radiation, does your router burn you?

Even though that is indeed a simple, quite trivial example, it does not really apply to the case of 30~50 GHz in combination with significant beamforming, because the average power density deposited into surface tissue can be much higher than with 2.4 GHz. You just can't focus 2.4 GHz onto a square inch (~6.5 cm^2) with a far-field-optimized antenna. According to [0], humans can sense an energy dose of 4J (0.2 K threshold, 5 cm^2 area, 1 cm penetration depth) in their palm due to the temperature rise. Assuming, say, 1 W focused onto the spot, that'd be just 4 seconds until it's perceptible. Measurable, harmful effects at thresholds slightly lower than what's perceptible don't see that far-fetched, once you consider the shallow sub-surface heating.

I don't think there'd be any frequency-dependent effects that don't stem from the interaction of penetration depth, triggered circulation (transporting heat away), and deposited power. Neglecting triggered circulation, it'd seem viable to just test thermally-mediated health effects from focused, 0.01~10 W @ 20~50 GHz (spot size limited due to a reasonable (0.1~0.8) numerical aperture of the beam focusing system) radiation.

[0]: https://books.google.de/books?id=4dL6CAAAQBAJ Fig 3.a page 437

> Below the middle of UV, photons don't have enough energy to ionize anything. Thus begins "non-ionizing radiation", which as far as we know, just burns you

Photodissociation is not simply heating. Red light is for example known to affect the mitochondrial electron transport chain

So I posted this comment because I wanted to spark a discussion where intelligent people consider the safety implications of 5G, which is very hard to find on the internet. Unfortunately that hasn't happened so far, so I decided to dig a bit more on my own.

Step 1 so far has been Wikipedia, where I found the reassuring sentence "The scientific consensus is that 5G technology is safe.[99][100][101]" Unfortunately, after checking those sources it appears that one is a blog and the other two are news articles about the same event - a press release from the ICNIRP. Further research on the ICNIRP shows that it is a private organization that declared itself that it only considered the thermal dangers of RF in the cm-wave range, and any other dangers do not exist.

And that is the common path to "proving" 5G safety on the internet: "the only way that this could be bad is heating; there's no heating; bam, it's safe, we're done here."

The reality, of course, is that EM waves have many mechanisms of action. So far, we know of the following:

- Ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons, x-rays, etc) can easily kill you or give you cancer

- Non-UV visible light can increase skin aging, cause retinal injuries

- Tons of EM waves can burn you or increase body temperature causing other problems (tissue heating)

- Nerve disturbance from low-frequency RF

That's four methods of ways EM waves can hurt you. Everyone is in agreement about that - no matter how you slice it, there's a minimum of those four. But that's a minimum. Relatively few good quality longitudinal studies have been run about EM waves. "Hey, can we put this weird thing in your home and see if it gives you cancer?" is a hard sell, I guess.

But unfortunately there seems to be not one single high-quality, longitudinal study researching the effects of living with constant mm-wave sources. There are a few short-term studies, but most of these are on the order of hours (!) of exposure.

One interesting thing I did find was a Swiss study showing people living near high voltage power lines were more than two times more likely to get Alzheimer's than people living just 600m away. While that's a completely different type of EM than 5G, it does hint that there may be more harmful mechanisms of EM radiation than we currently know.

Yes, but the "other mechanisms" of EM harm you list do not apply to mm-waves. Imagine being wrapped in lead to protect your organs from harmful mm-waves. That's effectively already the case; mm-waves can't penetrate skin, eyes or anything else.

Moreover, the power levels you're encountering from a base station are minuscule. It's underappreciated as a miracle of engineering that we can reliably communicate with signals that are 10^-12 W. You're at more danger from a 10W fluorescent light bulb.

>> mm-waves can't penetrate skin, eyes or anything else.

Ah, I see you made the same mistake as basically everyone researching mm-waves: you forgot about babies. See, they're born with very thin skin, so mm-waves can go right through their dermis. Will that have any effects? Who knows! It'll be a long time till the first 5G babies will be in college.

Furthermore, a lot of things are cumulative effects. Asbestos, of course, doesn't instantly kill you; asbestosis requires a large exposure over a long period of time.

Look at the research around kHz EM waves and Alzheimer's, for example. We've all been near a HV line for few minutes, I'd bet. When they were invented, I'm sure people tested them by standing next to them for hours - they were fine, of course. Turns out you have to build up exposure over a period of some 15 years living next to a HV line... and then you have a 200% chance of Alzheimer's.

Oh cut it out. Everybody is made of water. Even babies. Nothing penetrates.

"Think of the children!" is getting pretty tired sounding.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. Not cool.

We've had to ask you this multiple times before. Continuing to do it will eventually get your account banned, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on.

Yes, I regret that comment. I apologize.

Excuse me?

Someone said mm-waves cannot go through skin. I mentioned that the scientific consensus is that babies' skin is thin enough that mm-waves penetrate the dermis. I was absolutely not starting a "think of the children".

>> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

The established consensus is that mm-waves do penetrante the dermis of babies. Even recent research can agree on that. Here's one recent source.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334078749_Millimete...

Its hard to take your arguments seriously when you link to a paper on military research on a weapon that "can heat the skin to a temperature of 130F" and then compare it to cellular RF emissions, which would typically encounter your skin at a power level in the range of 10^-12W (-90dBm). It doesnt matter which layers of skin that does or doesnt penetrate, its just not going to do much of anything.

Why do you think there is a risk to babies? What are you having that on specifically? It seems like you are reaching for something "untested". Also microwaves use 2.4Ghz, heat lamps are infrared, 5G is a wide array of spectrums, so what specific frequency and power do you think will harm babies and why?

(Also if something just affects babies, it doesn't make sense to talk about the cumulative effects over decades)

The established consensus is that mm-waves do penetrante the dermis of babies. Even recent research can agree on that. Here's one recent source.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334078749_Millimete...

I do not believe that anything in the tens of GHz is either safe or unsafe. The frank reality is that we simply do not know, as not one person in human history has ever lived with a mm-wave source of any power for an extended period of time.

With new RF technology, the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety, not random Internet commenters to prove its danger.

I was hoping to have an actual discussion here, but I guess people would rather just blindly defend any new technology without even a cursory look at its safety.

That's not even remotely close to being a source for what you are saying.

You need a source that shows that there is something different about babies, different about the 5G frequencies, and different from the light, infrared, microwave and radio frequencies that are currently being used everywhere.

Instead, you referenced a paper on a military pain ray that uses focused super high power 100Kw 95Ghz waves that says it penetrates 1/64th of an inch. Your microwave is 2.4Ghz, just like your router, but it works at 1kw. There is an enormous gap between saying "what about babies" and what you linked. They have basically nothing to do with each other. I think you realize that, but you keep saying "we don't know", when you really mean "I don't know".

> the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety

How can anything be deomstrated to someone who ignores what they are being told and repeats "we just don't know" while supporting their predefined beliefs with giants leaps in logic and excessively irrelevant information?

> I was hoping to have an actual discussion here

I don't believe you. You didn't even confront my original question of what frequencies and effects you are specifically worried about. All you have seemed to being up so far is heat from power 100 times what your microwave uses. 100kw is 4,000 times the power of a soldering iron that can melt tin and lead.

Oh come on. What I am saying - and I will repeat this - is "mm-waves do penetrate the dermis of human babies." No more, no less. This is the scientific consensus. I provided the first source I found, which related to military research, yes. The broader context is irrelevant, I'm not sure why you wrote a whole comment harping on that. I provided it as a simple counterpoint to someone saying that mm-waves did not penetrate skin.

And the broader context of what I am saying is not that 5G is dangerous, just that there should be more effort to determine its safety before rolling out a new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.

Looks like I am not the only one saying existing studies do not cover things, and there is a need for further research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/

You realize that a source would be something that has to do with what you are saying right? I asked for a source on how a 5G frequency at their amplitude would affect a baby differently and you linked a 100kw military pain ray that has nothing to do with what you are saying, then said, 'i just linked the first source I could find'. That isn't a 'source'. Also your current link doesn't say anything about what you are claiming and actually contradicts it. Even what you linked says that it doesn't go as deep as the thickness of a fingernail. Wifi penetrates more and infrared heat lamps are far more powerful, so again, what frequencies and what effects are you specifically worried about?

> new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.

It isn't a 'new' type of em radiation. It isn't a mystery, it is just a mystery to you. You just avoid confronting real information by saying "I don't know". You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject is your own fault at this point, but you are desperate to hang on to it.

We've warned you multiple times that we'd ban you for attacking other users. You've kept doing it, so I've banned you.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

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

It looks to me like I've been banned for calling a ycombinator funded hypnosis app nonsense.

We moderate HN less when YC or YC-funded startups are the topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That doesn't give you a pass to break HN's rules egregiously and ignore our requests to stop. You've been doing this for a long time, including with accounts before this one, and we've warned you on many occasions. Actually we probably let you get away with it for longer than we normally would.

Looking back at your account history I noticed other cases of you attacking other users, which we didn't see at the time and certainly would have moderated and perhaps banned you for. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186380.

I appreciate that you've also posted a lot of good comments (but then again, also a lot of snarky ones). If you genuinely want to commit to using HN as intended, we can unban you.

There is a difference between attacking someone and being blunt. If you want to ban people and scold them for being blunt then you might as well say that, but to say this is attacking someone is not reasonable. It would be different if there was some sort of uniformity to this, but it seems more like a self righteous crusade to get people to apologize to you personally for not sugar coating what they say.

I've occasionally bit my tongue really hard in not calling someone an idiot outright.

Semi-recent example (shared previously w/ dang):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133112

The person I'd replied to ... thanked me.

Your reply reads better without the attacks.

I don't need you or anyone to apologize to me personally. The only issue is whether you'll abide by the site guidelines in the future.

Interpretation is part of applying the rules, but I don't think there's so much variance in how we interpret them. Something like that gets pretty regular and tedious after you've done it a hundred thousand times.

Nah, sorry, you can't use that both ways. Either you generalize existing research to cover a range of EM and circumstances of use, or you don't. You can't just pick one when it's convenient.

>> You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject

OK, +1 for making me actually laugh. Dude, I am the only one of us linking any scientific studies or literature review whatsoever. You're the one sprinkling snarky one liners about routers burning you. You also still didn't respond to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/

Just relax: I'm not saying 5G is the illuminati turning the frogs gay, I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology before deploying it to humans at an unprecedented scale.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. It's exactly the opposite of what this site is for.

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

> we should research a new technology before deploying it to humans at an unprecedented scale.

5G is an industry marketing term, not some fundamental redefining of physics. Nothing about emission of radio waves is some new or unknowable phenomenon that requires more research to understand. If you're suggesting otherwise, the burden of providing even a mildly plausible hypothesis is on you, not just "I dont understand this, therefore maybe it is bad".

All you did was link a 20 page paper without quoting what you think is relevant, and yet I already said that it contradicts what you are saying. It doesn't talk about children or infants or babies but it does talk about how shallow the penetration depth is.

I've given you real numbers from your own sources and broken them down into intuitive examples. You might not realize this, but this is just an exercise in seeing what someone does when they have to continually reject information while having none of their own to hold on to a belief that is rooted in emotion.

> I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology

Now you are saying that, before you were saying "what about penetrating a babies thin skin". It has been researched, you found some research, it just doesn't say what you want.

We haven't even gotten to the fact that microwave communications are already on lots of cellphone towers and used to communicate with office buildings etc. Not only that but these higher frequencies don't even go through walls. They barely go through rain or fog.

I'd be more concerned with the fact that the increased quantity and precision of the antennas allows collection of extremely fine-grained location information.

This is an interesting thought. It wouldn't be more precise than the GPS tracker already in your pocket, but it does open up more info to people other than Google.

Also as a note, regular MIMO (not "massive") wouldn't provide location information as the scattering channel is generally considered random.

I have this irrational fear of 5G for some reason and I consider myself a rational person with a pro-technology bias.

This fear stems from a combination of factors leading to unknown unknowns:

1. Little benefit for consumers with 4G (this is admitted even by pro 5G side implementing the tech)

2. Thus leading to question - who benefits when your toaster joins road sensors in the internet of shit. Webcams already are not doing too hot on the privacy front.

3. Lack of health studies

4. The feeling of being pushed down consumer throats.

5. Last not least the fight between 5G providers/implementers at a state level .

Why not at least do some health studies?

Yeah, I've been slightly concerned about those numbers for a while now. I am in the same boat as you; we think radio waves are totally safe, I get that. But the increase in background spectral density & energy is going to be huge. Makes me feel like we should up our certainty levels a bit more first.

Thanks! I'm glad I'm not the only one. And exactly - it's such a massive jump that it deserves a careful look, which it doesn't seem like it really has gotten so far. I'm not saying it's going to give people cancer, but we just don't know what it may or may not do. Maybe there are absolutely no side effects. Maybe it's even beneficial to health! Hell, exposure to enough EM radiation in the hundreds of nanometers range is actually a requirement for human health.

But maybe it has a negative effect on anything from birds to bacteria to humans, and I think it's worth investigating that before we deploy it extremely rapidly in all of the world's cities.

I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. And that's a bridge, which humans have been building for some 20,000 years. And it's made out of one thing - steel - which we generally understand very well.

I really hope there will be no side effects. But the chance that there will scares me a bit. 5G will be rapidly rolled out at enormous, unprecedented scale and density in nearly all the big world cities - and in 2020 most of the world lives in cities.

>> I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area.

No it isn't. The engineers knew this sound was going to happen. It was not accidental.

Apparently the noise on the pedestrian path itself is powerful enough that some people report it is literally unbearable while walking in the wind. From what I've read, the engineers only predicted that there would be some amount of hum, not that it would be nearly this loud.

And again, the things involved here are bridges (which humans have been making for some 14,000 years) and wind (familiar to humans for our entire existence.) 5G uses little-studied frequencies around 50 GHz that we really know extremely little about compared to the widely used cm-wave.

Up our certainty levels of what? You haven't enumerated a credible concern and so far as I can tell nobody else has.

A really big increase in a number without a framework to contextual it doesn't mean anything.

I loathe to weigh in on this, but I do think it is worth pointing out that society has often taken a trust but verify approach to other aspects of health. For example, you don't need a credible concern for the testing of new medicines and devices.

Given the financial and health stakes (>$100B & >100M lives) a through animal study and RCT trial doesn't seem unreasonable. You could relatively cheaply raise a few generations of animals on top of a 5G antenna and look at cellular and reproductive toxicity. Following that, you could do a RCT with real/ sham antennae in bedrooms as part of roll-out.

Its unreasonable to insist on studies because there is no plausible mechanism for there to be a significant effect. Emission of radio waves is not a new phenomenon, we understand pretty well the physics behind radio waves and how they interact with matter. Slapping a new marketing term (5G) on them doesnt change anything.

I think we agree on the current understanding of physics, but disagree on our understanding of biological interactions, and on our risk tolerances.

What would you study precisely? Install 5G in one city and look for anything that could possibly go wrong in that city and try to figure out the 100,000 possible confounding factors and assign blame to 5G for anything we couldn't figure out how to explicate?

I clearly spelled out two studies that I thought were reasonable in the parent post. What do you think of them?

I would think raising animals on top of the antennas sound analogous to what people would experience given difference in body size and how the inverse square law applies.

Even so I can't imagine this kind of study actually showing anything while wasting multiple years during which we could be moving forward. How about you raise money to fund the study virtually nobody wants to do and if you find something you can watch smugly while everyone tears down towers.

The NIH could cunduct the studies or the FCC could make it a condition of using the frequency. Funding should be a drop in the bucket compared to actual deployment (low millionions for a study vs hundred of billions invested in 5G)

>How about you raise money to fund the study virtually nobody wants to do and if you find something you can watch smugly while everyone tears down towers.

I find this to be a very rude comment. I have no interest in being smug, And honestly don't think it is a high risk. Given the health of hundreds of millions of people, I would like to see some basic confirmatory testing conducted to confirm safety. It is fine if you disagree, but why bother responding if you are just going to make snide comments and be an asshole about it.