Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Hm. Sure, some people just point to how the same thing happened with GSM, 2G, 3G, 4G, WiFi... but that's just a fallacy, because we also know that gamma rays, X-rays and UV are harmful, so deductively there must be some grey zone between 3G and hard gamma rays. Since we can't simply infer the health effects with certainty from first principles (let's say from physics/chemistry) we should demand relevant data.

But we have a lot of data (even if not as an enormous pile as about WiFi), and we know that so far the evidence points to no unexpected effects. There are interesting avenues of inquiry about the effects of 50-70 GHz on biology (heating of insects, interference with bacterial growth), of course those effects are a lot smaller than what we already do from air pollution to manufacturing an dumping lot of chemicals everywhere, heating our cities, and so on.



Between Gamma rays and 3G is UV. Between UV and 3G is visible light. Between visible light and 3G is IR, one of which is the heat human bodies give off. Do warm blooded animals cause cancer? Because they're still a far higher frequency than 3G and the wattage of a human at rest is 100W which is roughly equivalent.

Do hugs cause cancer? If yes, then we can start narrowing it down to 3G/5G more after that. But by that stage I think we're doomed as a species anyway.


Microwaves are around 2.4G yet they can pump a lot of energy into water, and that can be an unintended side effect with WiFi.

Of course that's one thing that we know about, we can reason about, and that's why people are not getting boiled.


Yes, wattage matters. The comment you responded to covered that.

> the wattage of a human at rest is 100W which is roughly equivalent.


I was more referring to energy density and total energy density over time. Also absorption patterns and penetration depth.

We know these pretty well, but they are not trivial (due to non-linearity creeping in).


No, we can quite safely say that visible light also does not cause cancer, seeing as how we're bathed in it daily.

So any proposed grey area would in fact have to be a total surprise outlier, where EM far less energetic then visible light tripped over some biological weak spot.


Visible light is between 3G and gamma rays. Gama rays are dangerous because they can yank electrons out of atoms and thus change their chemical makeup.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: