5 ms·

>> 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 see

>> 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.1751-1097.1990.tb01972.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-1097.... [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4734149/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4734149/ [3]: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/169/2/167/95445 https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/169/2/167/95445 [4]: https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/article/20/10/1971/5419764 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.

namibj 6y ago
> 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"?
- jrockway 6y ago
  There are some interesting radio transmissions in the ~10kHz region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency)
  - namibj 6y ago
    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.
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  Wow, you are really struggling with the whole "Assume good faith" thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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-lot-more-energy-than-4g-base-stations-says-mtn https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-l...
  - ac29 6y ago
    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.
  - namibj 6y ago
    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.
jrockway 6y ago
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/ 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 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).
BubRoss 6y ago
Your microwave uses 2.4 GHZ radiation, does your router burn you?
- namibj 6y ago
  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 https://books.google.de/books?id=4dL6CAAAQBAJ Fig 3.a page 437

namibj 6y ago

> 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"?

jrockway 6y ago
There are some interesting radio transmissions in the ~10kHz region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency)
- namibj 6y ago
  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.
owenversteeg 6y ago
Wow, you are really struggling with the whole "Assume good faith" thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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-lot-more-energy-than-4g-base-stations-says-mtn https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-l...
- ac29 6y ago
  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.
- namibj 6y ago
  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.

jrockway 6y ago

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/ 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 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).

BubRoss 6y ago

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

namibj 6y ago
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 https://books.google.de/books?id=4dL6CAAAQBAJ Fig 3.a page 437