5 ms·
>Someone with physics knowledge please calm me down? All radio is non-ionizing EM, far lower frequency then visible light, thermal, etc. UV, Xrays, and gamma r
by xoa 3y ago
>Someone with physics knowledge please calm me down?
All radio is non-ionizing EM, far lower frequency then visible light, thermal, etc. UV, Xrays, and gamma rays are in the opposite direction, higher frequency. Radio cannot do anything except minor amounts of heating, and at milliwatts of transmission power and inverse square law that's REALLY minor amounts of heating. There is no link to any sort of health effects from indirect distant exposure by far, far stronger things like radar or people working at AM/FM radio transmitters, nor any plausible theoretical one (though of course one should be careful with raw high power stuff that could create enough heat to cook, as well as the high voltage components that power it). Just in terms of natural exposure we face endless things that cause vastly stronger thermal effects.
I don't know if that's enough to calm you down, or if the entire planet going to massive wireless usage in the span of a decade and over a decade later no discernible significant related physical health effects (mental/social effects aside here, which are real but software not hardware) makes you feel better, but if nothing else don't get scammed by people who lump all "RADIATION!!" together as if the photoelectric effect and quantum mechanics was never discovered. Nor get hyperfocused on some specific tiny but "new" seeming device while ignoring the ginormously bigger ones around you take for granted and never think about (rightly in most cases).
- garyfirestorm 3y agoSun! It emits far more radiation than anything else and we don’t care about walking in sunlight.
- h1fra 3y agoWell tbh sun is responsible for millions of skin cancer every year
- lxgr 3y agoThat argument is actually the same error that GP criticizes: Wavelength (i.e. quantized energy) matters a lot. Being irradiated by hundreds of watts of direct sunlight is fine for a short while (and causes skin cancer in the long term!), hundreds of watts of microwave radiation for the same duration is already pretty bad, and the only good thing about hundreds of watts of hard gamma radiation is that you don't have to worry about the long-term effects too much. With mobile devices, we're talking about dozens or at most hundreds of milliwatts of microwave radiation though; there might be some effect, but I personally doubt it would be significant enough to worry about – earlier cell phones used way higher power levels, and I'm not aware of any link to cancer there. And they've been around for a while! Last time I read up on it, the heating effect of holding any metal or plastic slab to the side of your head dominates any additional heat transfer from the EM radiation, even for fairly deep tissues.
- kube-system 3y agoAnd the sun emits ionizing radiation, which radio devices do not. And ionizing radiation is known to damage DNA and cause cancer.
- usr1106 3y agoThe sun emits UV which certainly causes skin cancer if you get too much of it.
- kube-system 3y agoYes, this is what I am referring to. The transition from non-ionizing to ionizing occurs within the UV part of the spectrum.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoI don't believe that low frequency would have adverse affects but I would like them to _really_ look into higher frequencies (as we approach microwave) just so, you know, we actually know if it's bad or not. None of this "oops arsenic wallpaper is actually bad" "oops asbestos is actually bad" "oops lead in fuel is actually bad" "oops microplastics could actually be bad" stuff. And we do care about walking in sunlight, it's called sunblock/suncream. People that spend their lives in a lot of sunlight are at higher risk for skin cancer, have you never seen what someone's skin looks like after a career of working outdoors? As a Kiwi I guess I'm just more aware of the Sun; thanks to the rest of the world we have a huge ozone hole above us so our UV levels can get pretty mad around 11:00-13:00 in Summer.
- xenonite 3y ago..oops sun screen is actually bad too (Octocrylene is the latest problematic newcomer), and would need a very thick application to get the claimed effectiveness.
- sixstringtheory 3y agoAnd then if you’re curious to know more about ionizing radiation and the scale at which we absorb it and where it really becomes concerning, there’s an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/