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