Unfortunately, a statement like that, has just as much value as the conspiracy theory. Since 5G is a vastly different technology, the only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know the health risks at this point.
We know how the wavelengths penetrate into the body and how much power goes into the skin. In new 60 Ghz 5G wavelengths skin reflects 20-30% of the power and the rest is almost completely absorbed by the epidermis. Overall the power densities are so slow that there is no reason to except anything.
Exposing skin to the sun is known radiation hazard. If you go outside during daytime why worry about 5G?
> skin reflects 20-30% of the power and the rest is almost completely absorbed by the epidermis.
So 70% of the energy is absorbed by the skin. What does that much energy at those freqs do to the epidermis? I don't know, you don't know. I'm not saying you're making a case for the conspiracy theories, but you're certainly not making one against them.
> If you go outside during daytime why worry about 5G?
If you go outside during daytime on an Australian summer day without sunscreen including underneath your clothing, you're going to get severe sunburn and permanently increase your chance of skin cancer in under 15 minutes. We have public awareness campaigns about this on TV and everything. Not a great comparison.
I have no idea whether 5g freq ranges and power have health impacts, I'm just saying that clearly you don't either.
You could repeat everything you said for 2.450 MHz and sound plausible, except that's the frequency of microwave ovens that cook things including humans. Do any molecules resonate at 5g freqs? I have no idea, neither do you.
Molecules don't resonate at 5G frequencies.. even with 5G mmWave, the wavelengths are about 10,000x too long (millimeters). It's like riding on a cruise ship in the ocean and worrying that the wine glass in your hand is going to resonate and shatter from the ocean waves.
The impact on tissue is still thermal.. and the power flux densities of 5G are small compared to the sun, especially so because RF bandwidths are tiny compared to the blackbody radiation spectrum of the sun.
You would have to show why these RF transmissions are more pathological than the random process EM waves generated by solar blackbody. If you look at a modern cellular OFDM waveform, it is almost statistically indistinguishable from broadband noise. It had the same Peak to average power ratio, the same flat spectral bandwidths, and the same affinity to causing resonances--its just much much lower in amplitude than solar.
All polar molecules will react to all EM fields. (did you know you can bend a water stream with a magnet?).
The wavelength of microwave ovens is even longer, at 6.66cm. And yet that's the rotational resonant frequency of water. Weird, huh? By the way, you can confirm this with a single slice of cheese with the turnplate removed and then calculate the speed of light from the burn marks on that cheese being 3.33cm apart :)
The only question is whether that reaction at any given frequency has any impact on the larger system those molecules are part of.
The answer is scientists aren't sure because they haven't had a chance to experiment much, and you and I are sure as shit not qualified to comment on it.
I'm not going to don a tinfoil hat over 5g rollouts, but this cavalier attitude of just expecting everything to be fine without any meaningful testing is just as bad if not worse than the conspiracy theories.
Microwave ovens are not very narrowband and certainly do not excite 'rotational resonances of water'. The periodic burn marks on your cheese are from coarse standing waves within the microwave oven cavity (related to the magnetron resonance and spacing of the walls).. it has nothing to do with molecular resonances.
EDIT: the reason it cooks food is the intensity of the field strength (1 kilowatt per cubic ft, or ~27,000 watts per cubic meter) in a microwave oven. 5G signals are tens of microwatts (millionths of a watt) per cubic meter. That's a difference of a factor of 10's of billions.
Please explain the mechanism for the 2.45Mhz microwave oven cooking food and how that rules out the possibility of the 5g band having unintended interactions with molecules found in living organisms. You can settle this debate for the EU and save them a few million bucks worth of studies.
>The wavelength of microwave ovens is even longer, at 6.66cm. And yet that's the rotational resonant frequency of water. Weird, huh? By the way, you can confirm this with a single slice of cheese with the turnplate removed and then calculate the speed of light from the burn marks on that cheese being 3.33cm apart :)
Not really. 2.4GHz was chosen because it allowed to built microwave ovens at that particular size and because nobody cares about the 2.4GHz range. You can build 900 MHz ovens too, there are some, mainly for industrial usage.
All EM waves can interact with molecules in our bodies, that’s true.
But all of the interaction is thermal, not ionizing. And the energy levels are so tiny that the thermal impact is much less than the thermal impact of opening or closing a window on a warm day.
Microwave ovens have thermal interactions with the food inside them, because the microwave runs at tens of thousands of times higher power than is used for radio frequency signaling.
2.4 GHz WiFi isn’t microwaving our bodies, and neither will 5G.
Restricting the harm window to ionising radiation is a red herring.
We know that magnetic fields alone have very apparent interactions with humans and other living organisms[1].
The only mitigating factor here is the TRP, but at the FCC limit of 500 watts ERP per channel, that's actually not too far off from microwave ovens. I doubt it'll hurt humans unless they happen to live in the immediate path of an eNodeB, but I don't think either one of us is qualified to speculate about what it'll do to inspects and birds that will pass much closer to it.
Your wifi router isn't cooking you because it's at a significantly lower ERP than a microwave oven, but the same is not true for a mobile cell.
I will not dispute that if you are less than a meter from a transmitting cell tower, you might be uncomfortable.
But the induced magnetic fields from this level of power, dispersed at an inverse square rate, which isn’t penetrating far past the skin, just doesn’t seem reasonable to fear.
It's true that we don't have the full picture. Nothing is certain yet, but the most likely health effects will be indirect. Two areas of concern are effects on insect populations, which are already in collapse, and effects on bacterial development, including potentially causing resistance to antibiotics. These studies would be a good place to start if you're interested in more information:
Interestingly the antibiotic resistance is only seen in one particular number on a graph, whereas the other numbers show that EMF seems "beneficial" as it is slowing bacterial growth. Naturally the question is, what happens if you throw human tissue in the mix too.
Thanks for the alert to the paywall and the comments. I had originally read it on Nature and included the reference provided on the article.
The lack of consistency in results is definitely an issue, and it's true that it may be turn out to be a net benefit overall, which is why I believe we still don't have a clear understanding of the situation. Considering that bacteria adapt to their environment, we may see further unpredictable effects. The risk as I see it is not knowing how it may turn out before deploying it on a massive scale.
Sounds like the same thing they said for 2g, 3g, 4g and Wifi. As long as I don't see a big epidemic of brain tumors or something related, I'll take these claims with a pinch of salt.
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but am a cancer survivor, and feel compelled to reply that many forms of cancer have incubation periods [so to speak] approaching 20 years. So your salt is premature.
And mobile phones have existed for 40 years, gsm for almost 30.
Considering the most radiation is outputed during the phone conversations, and most people hold their phone always on the same side of the head (irradiating only that half), detecting an epidemic of mobile phone radiation sicknesses would be easy, if there were any.
No I know what those are. But the industry has generally separated a "5G without mmWave" and a "5G with mmWave" as two stages of evolution. Massive MIMO, directional/beamforming, various ML techniques, improved coding, etc. generally fall into the former category
>the only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know the health risks at this point.
Nope, we know for certain it doesn't immediately cause irrepairable negative health damage that can be observed in a lab setting because this would have already been tested.
Wavelength not so much. From 700MHz to 5 GHz everything is in use. Now 3.4GHz (main 5G frequency) is right inbetween. Nearly noone is trying to build 5G networks with the high frequencies starting from 24GHz because you have a) no range and b) line of sight is preferred.
I think the main concern comes from the mM-wave frequencies from what I've read. The others are more of the same, but a lot of what I've seen--and I can't remember where at the moment--focused exclusively on the high frequency nodes that would (theoretically) be deployed in urban areas.
People don't realize they're exposed to mmwave already. If you're on a jet or ship, in sight of a jet or ship, near an airport (not just going through a body scanner), near a weather radar station, within line of sight of a microwave relay tower, walking through automatic doors, or driving, your body is absorbing mmwave RF from something. All of those sources are from radar, which is a lot more common than one might think.
Exposing skin to the sun is known radiation hazard. If you go outside during daytime why worry about 5G?