Early in 2019 several companies began to roll
out their new 5G cellular services in major
cities across the US.
These quiet roll outs served as test beds
for a host of new 5g cell phones, as well
as ways to stress test the technology itself.
And as happens with any new technology, some
people immediately started freaking out and
the internet was there to happily help them
run wild with rumors and conspiracy theories
about the dangers of 5g.
So what's really going on with 5g?
Is it going to cook our brains and kill us?
How dangerous is 5g?
To start, fear of new technologies is nothing
new, especially when they play an immediate
impact in our day to day life.
In the late 1800s cities around the world
began to install electric street lighting.
While many cities already enjoyed the benefit
of gas lamps, these were expensive to maintain,
generally only covered small areas of major
cities, and actually did have an element of
danger since gas is, you know, explosive.
Electric lamps however were cheap, and could
all be turned on and off with the switch of
a single button.
No longer would lamp lighters need to spend
hours each evening going around the city lighting
individual lamps one by one.
The new electric light technology promised
to make our growing cities well lit and keep
people safe while out at night- and not just
in the rich neighbourhoods were gas lighting
was popular.
While street lights are ubiquitous across
any modern nation, the plan to string up electric
street lighting across entire cities was met
by a wave of fear from the population.
Many feared the health hazards of lighting
up a city at night, as it would throw off
people's ability to tell night from day and
thus ruin sleep cycles.
Massive health hazards were predicted, as
millions of people had their sleep schedules
turned on their heads.
It was feared a wave of madness would overtake
humanity.
But, no such thing happened and those early
fear mongers would likely have a hay day with
our modern twenty-four-seven lifestyles.
Religious figures got in on the outrage too,
warning that lighting up entire cities would
violate God's natural laws.
That is because God had clearly made a difference
between night and day, and if we were to do
away with that divinely-inspired segregation
of light and dark then... who knows, demons
may burst forth from the mouth of hell, cats
and dogs would become best friends and up
would become down.
The Vatican feared offending God's own sleep
cycle so much that it initially banned gas
lights in the 1830s.
It might be tempting to laugh at the ignorance
of zealots and the ignorant masses of the
1800s, but you'd be doing so at the risk of
being laughed at yourself by future generations.
Today we are afraid of everything from chemtrails
to GMO foods, despite common sense and decades
worth of scientific studies.
You're free to laugh at the ignorance of 1800
citizens who believed electric lights would
drive everyone insane, as long as you don't
mind that in two hundred years you'll be laughed
at for being afraid of vaccines- if everyone
hasn't died to super-measles by then.
But of all the fears we have about our modern
world, the latest to hit the internet and
rumor mills around the world are fears over
5g cellular service.
But what even is 5g?
5G is simply another evolution in wireless
information transfer technology.
5G literally means fifth generation, but as
opposed to previous generations 5g operates
at much higher frequencies than previously
used.
The higher frequencies allow 5g service to
deliver greater packets of data, with the
potential estimated to be up to ten gigabytes
per second.
This could dramatically change our wireless
world and promises to make everything from
augmented and virtual reality to smart autonomous
vehicles a fixture of our lives.
Unfortunately though as you increase the frequency
of a carrier wave, its range is dramatically
decreased as is its ability to penetrate through
solid objects like walls.
This is why the military very often uses extremely
low frequency bandwidths to transmit messages,
most famously with its fleet of nuclear submarines
who use a global system of extreme low frequency
transmitters to communicate with its boats
from anywhere in the world.
Mention high frequency outside of a science
classroom though and the public very quickly
begins to soil their collective pantaloons.
On one hand the fears are justified, after
all history is full of examples of poorly
understood technologies being marketed to
an ignorant public- it wasn't too long ago
that ionizing radiation was promised as a
cure-all for, well everything.
You could find radioactive elements in everything
from makeup powders to breakfast cereals,
all with the promise that the ionizing radiation
would boost your vigour and refresh your health!
Of course it did pretty much the opposite,
and it didn't take long for people to figure
it out.
Yet today, unlike yesteryear, we have international
systems of scientific checks and balances
which work very well to stamp out bias and
scientific deception.
While a massive conspiracy to cook everyone's
brains with cell phones is not entirely impossible,
it would be an extremely difficult scheme
to sneak pass the thousands of watchdog agencies
all connected by the global internet.
Plus it doesn’t pass the first point of
failure for any conspiracy theory: common
sense.
If cell phone companies purposefully developed
a product that irradiated its consumers, those
same companies would A - be buried under mountains
of lawsuits, and B - not have consumers anymore
when people flat-out refused to use cell phones
out of fear.
Fears over cell phone radiation are nothing
new though, and have plagued the devices ever
since their mainstream adoption in the 1990s.
All matter of products have been marketed
promising to protect you from the risk of
electromagnetic radiation from your evil cell
phone, most of which were nothing more than
snake oil that did little if anything to block
the radio frequencies emitted by your cell
phone.
Ongoing public fears have prompted scientific
study after scientific study, and yet no valid
study has yet to prove that normal cell phone
use poses a real risk to humans.
In fact, back when killing people with radio
waves was something the Japanese were actually
trying to do during World War II, the best
they managed with extremely powerful modified
radar dishes was to kill a rabbit at a distance
of a few dozen feet- and even then only after
ten minutes and using an antenna several meters
across and locking the rabbit up in a cage
where it couldn't move.
After much careful scientific study by our
own Infographics research staff we were able
to conclude that your phone is in fact, far
smaller than a 3-meter wide antenna and you
are far larger than a rabbit.
Thanks to the United States and the Soviet
Union doing their darned best to kill every
human on planet earth for forty years though,
we have an understandable aversion to anything
with the word radiation in it.
This explains why people are so concerned
over cell phones, which blast out electromagnetic
radiation into their environment.
Coupled with the fact that you typically then
put these devices up to your head in order
to speak into them, we can see where the concerns
over radiation affecting people's brains come
from.
It's important to understand the differences
between the different types of radiation though.
The first, and the most feared, is ionizing
radiation, which is one of the types of radiation
emitted by a nuclear explosion.
This is the same stuff that comic books said
would turn us into super-powered Spidermen,
except unless your preferred superpower is
the ability to get cancer, then no it won't.
Ionizing radiation is harmful to living beings
because of the energy in its extremely short
wavelength and high frequency waves, which
can knock electrons loose from atoms and seriously
damage the molecules inside your body.
Non-ionizing radiation on the other hand doesn't
carry enough energy to break molecular bonds,
and the best that they can do is cause heating
by vibrating molecules at high speeds.
This is exactly how your microwave works-
it emits microwave radiation with high enough
energy to vibrate water molecules in your
food, generating heat which warms the food.
But with 5g using wavelengths similar to those
in a microwave, how in the world could our
cell phones not end up cooking our brains?
The answer to that question has to do with
power- a microwave can emit anywhere between
500 and 1000 watts of power, which actually
is enough to kill, if you were to crawl inside
a giant microwave and turn on the popcorn
setting that is.
It also emits this much energy continuously,
while a cell phone only emits a few watts
of power and even this comes in short bursts.
If you don't believe physics though, then
you can believe the tests done on live animals
to see how dangerous the electromagnetic radiation
given off by the frequencies used by cell
phones are.
One ten year study tracked colonies of mice
and rats which had their full bodies exposed
to radio frequencies used by 2g and 3g cell
services.
The test subjects were exposed for 18 hours
a day in intervals of ten minutes on and ten
minutes off, starting before they were even
born while inside their mothers and lasting
throughout the normal course of their lives.
The power level of the RF radiation used ranged
from above to slightly below permitted levels
for cellular devices, and after a decade the
study found no direct correlation between
RF radiation and ill health effects.
Given the far less exposure humans are subjected
to and the physical properties of 5g's very
high frequency waves, scientists have expressed
little fear that 5g will be dangerous.
For starters the waves are so poor at propagating
through objects and even just empty air that
companies are forced to build mini-towers
every city block or so, and in consumer tests
of 5g devices earlier this year most lost
service after getting only a few hundred feet
away from them.
This doesn't bode well for 5g waves trying
to penetrate through the layers of your skin
and skull in order to get to your defenseless
brain and start cooking it.
Nevertheless, we fully expect that fear mongering
and rumors will continue to spread as 5g rolls
out around the world, and we also don't expect
to be disappointed by the countless snake
oil salesman and their crazy inventions the
promise will protect you from the evil cell
phone radiation.
Of course we know that you know that this
is exactly what we'd say if we were in fact
part of a major conspiracy and in the pocket
of all of the major cell phone carriers and
manufacturers, which is why we encourage you
to do your own research into the difference
between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
But we’re also happy if you don't think
we're in fact part of a conspiracy by aliens
from the Zeti Reticuli system to secretly
cook all your delicious brains with radio
waves so as to make them the perfect temperature
and consistency for harvesting.
Do you plan on buying a 5g cell phone?
What do you think about them building mini
cell towers everywhere?
Let us know in the comments!
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