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.
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.
"Think of the children!" is getting pretty tired sounding.
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.
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...
(Also if something just affects babies, it doesn't make sense to talk about the cumulative effects over decades)
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.
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.
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/
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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".
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.
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.