8 ms·

Mast fire probe amid 5G coronavirus claims

33 points by frereubu 7y ago

joaomacp 7y ago
This pandemic is certainly providing lots of opportunity for behavioral and social studies.
crocal 7y ago
It is inevitable that in such an atmosphere unlikely targets are picked as scapegoats. If it stops at 5G antennas I guess we can consider ourselves fortunate.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Also a bunch of young people forced sitting at home
  - learnstats2 7y ago
    In my (unfortunately much greater than I would like) experience of people engaged with 5G conspiracies, they are not generally young.
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
      You’re right, but even these older people are not the ones who would be starting fires. They are usually the ones motivating the younger ones.
      - chvid 7y ago
        There is also a group of politicians who are not too proud to promote these conspiracies as a way to rally their base.
      - cbg0 7y ago
        > these older people are not the ones who would be starting fires Are you basing this off of something other than conjecture?
        heavenlyblue 7y ago
        Yes. Older people who would do that usually are already a part of some sort of organised crime ring. Younger however have a higher tendency of working for the idea (just the same way as younger people tend to work for startups). Or are you go tell me that younger people are statistically wiser than older ones?
jacquesm 7y ago
There are tons of gullible people out there. Twitter for instance is rife with accounts that spread this nonsense around as though it is gospel. Social media has been weaponized to get people to distrust anything they see or read online, alternatively to believe nonsense to the point that the real news starts to feel like nonsense too. This is the flip side of the coin, universal access to information and universal capability to generate information is a power that comes with a lot of responsibility and so far we are failing at that. Similar things are happening here on HN, there are accounts whose sole purpose it seems to be to derail any normal conversation or to bait others in to crossing the rules so they can be eliminated resulting in a lower signal:noise ratio. It's up to all of us to call this nonsense out and to relentlessly aim to stop it from spreading because at some level this is a fight with consequences reaching much further than just out little fora and comment sections of blogs. It is a war for mindshare of bogus ideas vs ideas with a basis in fact, the final prize is the votes of the gullible and to paralyze societies to be able to respond to crisis, man made or natural. The funny thing is that as soon as you go down that rabbit hole far enough the conspiracy theories end up being peddled by the ones who are actually conspiring. See for instance pizzagate.
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
  On this topic though I think we have to be huge grateful to HN, its community, and its moderators, who keep it - in my opinion - one of the least ridden with unsubstantiated nonsense sources on the net.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Yes, but it is a constant battle.
- jl6 7y ago
  So xkcd 386 but with global consequences?
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    I'm not a big fan of xkcd. It is used as a thinking persons' reaction gif around here and usually carries about as much substance. That you'd refer to it 'by number' already presupposed everybody has seen them so frequently you need say no more than that. As such it is part of the problem, not part of any solution that I'm aware of.
fit2rule 7y ago
Every time this whole conspiracy theory comes up in my circles, I ponder on the means by which it might be true, even though it (probably) isn't. <tinfoil> Perhaps there are microwave frequencies which are conducive to agitating bacterial/microbial/viral activity - I could imagine a scenario, though I have no idea of the science/math involved, where the structures of the targeted vector are 'assisted' by remote stimulation. Like, you can give flagellum a little 'kick' in the thrashing-around frequencies, which make it more violent against cell-wall structures, and so on. Think, magnetohydrodynamics at pico scale. Were such a thing feasible, I'm quite sure DARPA discovered it decades ago. That's what its for, right? Either way, there is a way to approach this subject which doesn't encourage hand-waving and woohoo thinking, but I'm not capable of it. I'm sure there are ways that microwaves can be applied against biological targets that we, the non-scanning-electron-microscope-using general public, probably don't quite get, just yet, has been weaponised .. </tinfoil>
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It's just energy, which can - like any other electromagnetic energy source - be harvested by the right resonant mechanism. The chances of a particular frequency band at such low field-strengths having an impact on a structure not expressly designed for it is super small. It would be like the evolutionary equivalent of finding a 'u-beam[1]' ready receiver in something made in the 1920's. [1] The fraudulent wireless ultrasound charging company.
- downshun 7y ago
  > every time (conspiracy) comes up I ponder on the means by which it might be true Wrong. [1] Try to falsify. "Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, whereby the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proved or disproved." [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
  - 7y ago
jakub_g 7y ago
I used to be somehow in the middle regarding "is X dangerous" discussions because while probably generally not an issue for large majority people, there is probably a small .% of people who are legitimately oversensitive to various stuff (like, say, some people are allergic to certain foods). And it sucks to be the ignored "edge case" person and not be able to do anything about it (think any time your bug report was rejected). However I came across this thread that made me realize, many people come up with claims out of thin air (perhaps not even being malicious, just doing fake correlations etc.): https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1245814828079427585 https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1245814828079427585 > an anecode that was told to me when I visited the operations centre of a large French mobile phone operator a few years ago. (after installation of new tower) > everyone who can see the tower, calls the mayor and says they have headaches > the mayor demands to know what we're going to do to make the headaches stop. > And we say, well, we haven't switched the mast on yet.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I had a house up for sale for a long time. One day a man and his wife from Amsterdam came to view it. They brought with them a little box. The lady was allergic to 'radiation', and the box would tell her if this house was the one or not. She walked to-and-fro with the box pointing it all all kinds of bits mumbling to herself, and then walked out into the garden. After two hours of this she came back to us and said that it was all very nice but it wouldn't do, just too much radiation. I asked her if I could look at the box. It was a field-strength meter with a built in amplifier hooked up to a variety of possible antennae, an open dipole and a small loop. She didn't understand the first thing about electromagnetic waves (polarization, for instance). The thing was set to its most sensitive setting amplifying the crap out of any background noise and picked up all kinds of interesting sources, one of which was the sun, essentially turning it into a complex detector for something you didn't need a field-strength meter for in the first place: to tell you where our life giving star is in the sky. I pointed this out to her and she went to sit in the car in a huff while her husband hung around for a bit. Apparently they'd been seeing 100's of houses and none of them ever were good enough. Meanwhile, they lived in Amsterdam, right opposite of the microwave support tower next to RAI, a spot so bad that whenever I would pass it my cellphone would spontaneously reboot because of the strength of the electrical field. I never knew if she was serious or whether she imagined the whole thing or was just looking for a way to get some quality time with her husband. But I highly doubt she ever found a house that was good enough short of a mountain cave. But that house, about 300 meters away from the German border was about as isolated from anything radiation related you're going to find in Western Europe and if she wasn't making it up then for the life of me I do not understand what mechanism would underpin that sort of sensitivity.
FriendlyNormie 7y ago
How is anyone supposed to read the text on this page on a mobile device when the ads above the current scroll location keep loading and unloading with random heights that suddenly shift all the text on the page up and down by a large amount every few seconds?
- severine 7y ago
  Firefox + uBlock Origin? https://www.mozilla.org https://www.mozilla.org https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
tannhaeuser 7y ago
What's the story with 5G mast torching? Is it entirely in paranoid territory (eg. 5G causing infections) or is it based on a rational cause (5G causing health issues due to density, or that ubiquitous 5G critically helps mass surveillance due to low-cost, always-on receivers)?
- cbg0 7y ago
  > rational cause > 5G causing health issues due to density There's no link between health problems and 5G networks at this time. The UK has actually tested radiation levels in the field https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580
montalbano 7y ago
Another smaller HN discussion on a related article from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778815
wanda 7y ago
this is the way I'm looking at it, someone please correct me if I don't grasp the situation. definitions: • "ionising radiation" broadly refers to particles (alpha/beta particles; cosmic rays) and EM radiation types that are sufficiently energetic to directly or indirectly (respectively) displace electrons in the atomic structure of matter they pass through. there is no single definition of what counts as ionising radiation when it comes to human cells. it's normally said to be around 10eV – 30eV, but we'll come up with a catch-all definition for argument's sake later. we want to avoid ionisation of DNA, white blood cells, that sort of thing. • f = v / λ (Hz) • c = 3 × 10⁸ (m/s) • h = 6.62607015 × 10⁻³⁴ (J⋅s) • E = hf = hc/λ (eV) ___________ premises: • EM rays of high frequency have proportionately high photon energy • ionisation by EM radiation requires higher photon energy • the lowest threshold for ionisation of an atom of any element is caesium, at 3.9eV (low end ultraviolet) • the lowest energy EM radiation that can affect, damage or ionise bare DNA in a vaccuum will be greater than 3.9eV (or 3900meV) [1][2][3] • the highest frequency officially proposed for 5G to date is 86 GHz (λ ≈ 3.5 × 10⁻³m) [4] • an 86GHz microwave would have photon energy of 3.6×10⁻⁴eV (or 0.36meV) (8.6 × 10⁻¹⁰) × (6.62607004 × 10⁻³⁴) ≈ 5.7 × 10⁻²³J ≈ 0.00036eV • 0.36meV is a lot less energy than 3900meV ___________ conclusion: EM radiation in proposed 5G range is unable to ionise — and very unlikely to cause any damage to — organic molecules like DNA in a vacuum, without even contemplating absorption/attenuation or the fact that the vast majority of 5G is going to be even lower freq than 86 GHz. this is just ionisation we're talking about here, i.e. the shredding of your cells by penetrative, energetic radiation. 5G will not be used at anywhere near the kind of wattage as your microwave oven puts out. even if you put yourself in a microwave, yes you get cooked but this is because you absorb the EM radiation and it induces kinetic energy in you, as it would a bowl of porridge. similarly, if you sit yourself in front of a radar you'll probably feel pretty damn hot as well. ___________ I've seen some crazy people yelling about how 5G is almost the same frequency as crowd-dispersal microwave weapons use — but again, this weaponised form is a focused BEAM. if you use enough visible light you can cook yourself as well. incidentally, even with 5G masts all over the place (and they will be because it has a shorter effective range than 4G LTE) you won't be subjected to anywhere near the wattage a microwave oven or a military radar put out. if low energy EM waves damage DNA, your immune system, or cause anything related to cancer, it is not by any known physical mechanism [5] interestingly enough, I caught this on wikipedia: An international appeal to the European Union made on September 13, 2017 garnered over 180 signatures from scientists representing 35 countries. They cite unproven concerns over the 10 to 20 billion connections to the 5G network and the subsequent increase in RF-EMF exposure affecting the global populace constantly. The appeal also references the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) conclusion in 2011 that frequencies 30 kHz – 300 GHz are possibly carcinogenic in humans. this seems like something that will blow up in paranoid people's minds, and will make purveyors of fake news lick their lips, but consider that the entry on the list cited is "radiofrequency electromagnetic fields such as, but not limited to, those associated with wireless phones" so not just 5G at all, but also your granddad's radio, your 3G burner phone, your bluetooth headphones, your kid's remote-controlled car, your drone, etc. the spectacular list of "possibly carcinogenic things" in question [6] includes aloe vera and the occupation of carpentry/joinery. hey, maybe electromagnetic radiation causes cancer — but then again, so does interacting with pretty much everything else on the planet! also haven't we been using mm-λ waves in radars for ~50 years now? not seen any super mutants yet. _______________ [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20415/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20415/ [2]: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Folkard,%20M.,%20Int.%20J.%20Radiat.%20Biol.,%20Vol.76%202000.pdf http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Folkard,%20M.,%... [3]: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Prise,%20K.M.,%20Int.%20J.%20Radiat.%20Biol%20Vol.%2076,%20No.%207,2000.pdf http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Prise,%20K.M.,%... [4]: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5G-update-08022017.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5... [5]: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/radiation/electromagnetic-fields-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_Agents_-_Possibly_carcinogenic_to_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_Agents_-...
tyingq 7y ago
I'm surprised there's enough flammable material on a mast to set it on fire. Antenna radomes and wire insulation maybe?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Lots of foam inside HF coax, outer mantle will burn, paint will burn, electronics will burn very nicely and the are a lot of plastics that would sustain a fire. Nasty stuff coming off that too when burning (dioxins).
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Surprised they don't put all that in some sort of conduit though.
tzs 7y ago
RT.com has run a story calling these 5G coronavirus links "baseless conspiracy theories" [0]. In another story they say the same thing, and talk about "expert scientific studies repeatedly concluding that the high-speed communications system does not pose a threat to humans" [-1]. This is interesting because RT.com in 2018 and 2019 was one of the major source of baseless anti-5G health stories. Examples: • 5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1] • Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2] • How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3] • Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4] • ‘Totally insane’: Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5] RT.com videos on YouTube average over 1 million viewers per day, which is higher than any actual news outlet, and their claims are then repeated by many blogs and social media sites and other websites and then others pick it up from there, often losing the attribution to RT.com along the way so [6]. I wonder what caused RT.com's apparent flip on 5G? [-1] https://www.rt.com/sport/484967-coronavirus-5g-amir-khan/ https://www.rt.com/sport/484967-coronavirus-5g-amir-khan/ [0] https://www.rt.com/uk/484877-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies-mocked/ https://www.rt.com/uk/484877-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies-moc... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8 [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-health-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...

33 points by frereubu 7y ago

This pandemic is certainly providing lots of opportunity for behavioral and social studies.

It is inevitable that in such an atmosphere unlikely targets are picked as scapegoats. If it stops at 5G antennas I guess we can consider ourselves fortunate.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
Also a bunch of young people forced sitting at home
- learnstats2 7y ago
  In my (unfortunately much greater than I would like) experience of people engaged with 5G conspiracies, they are not generally young.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    You’re right, but even these older people are not the ones who would be starting fires. They are usually the ones motivating the younger ones.
    - chvid 7y ago
      There is also a group of politicians who are not too proud to promote these conspiracies as a way to rally their base.
    - cbg0 7y ago
      > these older people are not the ones who would be starting fires Are you basing this off of something other than conjecture?
      - heavenlyblue 7y ago
        Yes. Older people who would do that usually are already a part of some sort of organised crime ring. Younger however have a higher tendency of working for the idea (just the same way as younger people tend to work for startups). Or are you go tell me that younger people are statistically wiser than older ones?

jacquesm 7y ago

There are tons of gullible people out there. Twitter for instance is rife with accounts that spread this nonsense around as though it is gospel. Social media has been weaponized to get people to distrust anything they see or read online, alternatively to believe nonsense to the point that the real news starts to feel like nonsense too. This is the flip side of the coin, universal access to information and universal capability to generate information is a power that comes with a lot of responsibility and so far we are failing at that. Similar things are happening here on HN, there are accounts whose sole purpose it seems to be to derail any normal conversation or to bait others in to crossing the rules so they can be eliminated resulting in a lower signal:noise ratio. It's up to all of us to call this nonsense out and to relentlessly aim to stop it from spreading because at some level this is a fight with consequences reaching much further than just out little fora and comment sections of blogs. It is a war for mindshare of bogus ideas vs ideas with a basis in fact, the final prize is the votes of the gullible and to paralyze societies to be able to respond to crisis, man made or natural. The funny thing is that as soon as you go down that rabbit hole far enough the conspiracy theories end up being peddled by the ones who are actually conspiring. See for instance pizzagate.

2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
On this topic though I think we have to be huge grateful to HN, its community, and its moderators, who keep it - in my opinion - one of the least ridden with unsubstantiated nonsense sources on the net.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Yes, but it is a constant battle.
jl6 7y ago
So xkcd 386 but with global consequences?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I'm not a big fan of xkcd. It is used as a thinking persons' reaction gif around here and usually carries about as much substance. That you'd refer to it 'by number' already presupposed everybody has seen them so frequently you need say no more than that. As such it is part of the problem, not part of any solution that I'm aware of.

fit2rule 7y ago

Every time this whole conspiracy theory comes up in my circles, I ponder on the means by which it might be true, even though it (probably) isn't. <tinfoil> Perhaps there are microwave frequencies which are conducive to agitating bacterial/microbial/viral activity - I could imagine a scenario, though I have no idea of the science/math involved, where the structures of the targeted vector are 'assisted' by remote stimulation. Like, you can give flagellum a little 'kick' in the thrashing-around frequencies, which make it more violent against cell-wall structures, and so on. Think, magnetohydrodynamics at pico scale. Were such a thing feasible, I'm quite sure DARPA discovered it decades ago. That's what its for, right? Either way, there is a way to approach this subject which doesn't encourage hand-waving and woohoo thinking, but I'm not capable of it. I'm sure there are ways that microwaves can be applied against biological targets that we, the non-scanning-electron-microscope-using general public, probably don't quite get, just yet, has been weaponised .. </tinfoil>

jacquesm 7y ago
It's just energy, which can - like any other electromagnetic energy source - be harvested by the right resonant mechanism. The chances of a particular frequency band at such low field-strengths having an impact on a structure not expressly designed for it is super small. It would be like the evolutionary equivalent of finding a 'u-beam[1]' ready receiver in something made in the 1920's. [1] The fraudulent wireless ultrasound charging company.
downshun 7y ago
> every time (conspiracy) comes up I ponder on the means by which it might be true Wrong. [1] Try to falsify. "Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, whereby the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proved or disproved." [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
- 7y ago

jakub_g 7y ago

I used to be somehow in the middle regarding "is X dangerous" discussions because while probably generally not an issue for large majority people, there is probably a small .% of people who are legitimately oversensitive to various stuff (like, say, some people are allergic to certain foods). And it sucks to be the ignored "edge case" person and not be able to do anything about it (think any time your bug report was rejected). However I came across this thread that made me realize, many people come up with claims out of thin air (perhaps not even being malicious, just doing fake correlations etc.): https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1245814828079427585 https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1245814828079427585 > an anecode that was told to me when I visited the operations centre of a large French mobile phone operator a few years ago. (after installation of new tower) > everyone who can see the tower, calls the mayor and says they have headaches > the mayor demands to know what we're going to do to make the headaches stop. > And we say, well, we haven't switched the mast on yet.

jacquesm 7y ago
I had a house up for sale for a long time. One day a man and his wife from Amsterdam came to view it. They brought with them a little box. The lady was allergic to 'radiation', and the box would tell her if this house was the one or not. She walked to-and-fro with the box pointing it all all kinds of bits mumbling to herself, and then walked out into the garden. After two hours of this she came back to us and said that it was all very nice but it wouldn't do, just too much radiation. I asked her if I could look at the box. It was a field-strength meter with a built in amplifier hooked up to a variety of possible antennae, an open dipole and a small loop. She didn't understand the first thing about electromagnetic waves (polarization, for instance). The thing was set to its most sensitive setting amplifying the crap out of any background noise and picked up all kinds of interesting sources, one of which was the sun, essentially turning it into a complex detector for something you didn't need a field-strength meter for in the first place: to tell you where our life giving star is in the sky. I pointed this out to her and she went to sit in the car in a huff while her husband hung around for a bit. Apparently they'd been seeing 100's of houses and none of them ever were good enough. Meanwhile, they lived in Amsterdam, right opposite of the microwave support tower next to RAI, a spot so bad that whenever I would pass it my cellphone would spontaneously reboot because of the strength of the electrical field. I never knew if she was serious or whether she imagined the whole thing or was just looking for a way to get some quality time with her husband. But I highly doubt she ever found a house that was good enough short of a mountain cave. But that house, about 300 meters away from the German border was about as isolated from anything radiation related you're going to find in Western Europe and if she wasn't making it up then for the life of me I do not understand what mechanism would underpin that sort of sensitivity.

FriendlyNormie 7y ago

How is anyone supposed to read the text on this page on a mobile device when the ads above the current scroll location keep loading and unloading with random heights that suddenly shift all the text on the page up and down by a large amount every few seconds?

severine 7y ago
Firefox + uBlock Origin? https://www.mozilla.org https://www.mozilla.org https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

tannhaeuser 7y ago

What's the story with 5G mast torching? Is it entirely in paranoid territory (eg. 5G causing infections) or is it based on a rational cause (5G causing health issues due to density, or that ubiquitous 5G critically helps mass surveillance due to low-cost, always-on receivers)?

cbg0 7y ago
> rational cause > 5G causing health issues due to density There's no link between health problems and 5G networks at this time. The UK has actually tested radiation levels in the field https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580

montalbano 7y ago

Another smaller HN discussion on a related article from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778815

wanda 7y ago

this is the way I'm looking at it, someone please correct me if I don't grasp the situation. definitions: • "ionising radiation" broadly refers to particles (alpha/beta particles; cosmic rays) and EM radiation types that are sufficiently energetic to directly or indirectly (respectively) displace electrons in the atomic structure of matter they pass through. there is no single definition of what counts as ionising radiation when it comes to human cells. it's normally said to be around 10eV – 30eV, but we'll come up with a catch-all definition for argument's sake later. we want to avoid ionisation of DNA, white blood cells, that sort of thing. • f = v / λ (Hz) • c = 3 × 10⁸ (m/s) • h = 6.62607015 × 10⁻³⁴ (J⋅s) • E = hf = hc/λ (eV) ___________ premises: • EM rays of high frequency have proportionately high photon energy • ionisation by EM radiation requires higher photon energy • the lowest threshold for ionisation of an atom of any element is caesium, at 3.9eV (low end ultraviolet) • the lowest energy EM radiation that can affect, damage or ionise bare DNA in a vaccuum will be greater than 3.9eV (or 3900meV) [1][2][3] • the highest frequency officially proposed for 5G to date is 86 GHz (λ ≈ 3.5 × 10⁻³m) [4] • an 86GHz microwave would have photon energy of 3.6×10⁻⁴eV (or 0.36meV) (8.6 × 10⁻¹⁰) × (6.62607004 × 10⁻³⁴) ≈ 5.7 × 10⁻²³J ≈ 0.00036eV • 0.36meV is a lot less energy than 3900meV ___________ conclusion: EM radiation in proposed 5G range is unable to ionise — and very unlikely to cause any damage to — organic molecules like DNA in a vacuum, without even contemplating absorption/attenuation or the fact that the vast majority of 5G is going to be even lower freq than 86 GHz. this is just ionisation we're talking about here, i.e. the shredding of your cells by penetrative, energetic radiation. 5G will not be used at anywhere near the kind of wattage as your microwave oven puts out. even if you put yourself in a microwave, yes you get cooked but this is because you absorb the EM radiation and it induces kinetic energy in you, as it would a bowl of porridge. similarly, if you sit yourself in front of a radar you'll probably feel pretty damn hot as well. ___________ I've seen some crazy people yelling about how 5G is almost the same frequency as crowd-dispersal microwave weapons use — but again, this weaponised form is a focused BEAM. if you use enough visible light you can cook yourself as well. incidentally, even with 5G masts all over the place (and they will be because it has a shorter effective range than 4G LTE) you won't be subjected to anywhere near the wattage a microwave oven or a military radar put out. if low energy EM waves damage DNA, your immune system, or cause anything related to cancer, it is not by any known physical mechanism [5] interestingly enough, I caught this on wikipedia: An international appeal to the European Union made on September 13, 2017 garnered over 180 signatures from scientists representing 35 countries. They cite unproven concerns over the 10 to 20 billion connections to the 5G network and the subsequent increase in RF-EMF exposure affecting the global populace constantly. The appeal also references the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) conclusion in 2011 that frequencies 30 kHz – 300 GHz are possibly carcinogenic in humans. this seems like something that will blow up in paranoid people's minds, and will make purveyors of fake news lick their lips, but consider that the entry on the list cited is "radiofrequency electromagnetic fields such as, but not limited to, those associated with wireless phones" so not just 5G at all, but also your granddad's radio, your 3G burner phone, your bluetooth headphones, your kid's remote-controlled car, your drone, etc. the spectacular list of "possibly carcinogenic things" in question [6] includes aloe vera and the occupation of carpentry/joinery. hey, maybe electromagnetic radiation causes cancer — but then again, so does interacting with pretty much everything else on the planet! also haven't we been using mm-λ waves in radars for ~50 years now? not seen any super mutants yet. _______________ [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20415/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20415/ [2]: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Folkard,%20M.,%20Int.%20J.%20Radiat.%20Biol.,%20Vol.76%202000.pdf http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Folkard,%20M.,%... [3]: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Prise,%20K.M.,%20Int.%20J.%20Radiat.%20Biol%20Vol.%2076,%20No.%207,2000.pdf http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Prise,%20K.M.,%... [4]: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5G-update-08022017.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5... [5]: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/radiation/electromagnetic-fields-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_Agents_-_Possibly_carcinogenic_to_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_Agents_-...

tyingq 7y ago

I'm surprised there's enough flammable material on a mast to set it on fire. Antenna radomes and wire insulation maybe?

jacquesm 7y ago
Lots of foam inside HF coax, outer mantle will burn, paint will burn, electronics will burn very nicely and the are a lot of plastics that would sustain a fire. Nasty stuff coming off that too when burning (dioxins).
- tyingq 7y ago
  Surprised they don't put all that in some sort of conduit though.

tzs 7y ago

RT.com has run a story calling these 5G coronavirus links "baseless conspiracy theories" [0]. In another story they say the same thing, and talk about "expert scientific studies repeatedly concluding that the high-speed communications system does not pose a threat to humans" [-1]. This is interesting because RT.com in 2018 and 2019 was one of the major source of baseless anti-5G health stories. Examples: • 5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1] • Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2] • How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3] • Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4] • ‘Totally insane’: Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5] RT.com videos on YouTube average over 1 million viewers per day, which is higher than any actual news outlet, and their claims are then repeated by many blogs and social media sites and other websites and then others pick it up from there, often losing the attribution to RT.com along the way so [6]. I wonder what caused RT.com's apparent flip on 5G? [-1] https://www.rt.com/sport/484967-coronavirus-5g-amir-khan/ https://www.rt.com/sport/484967-coronavirus-5g-amir-khan/ [0] https://www.rt.com/uk/484877-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies-mocked/ https://www.rt.com/uk/484877-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies-moc... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8 [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-health-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...