Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

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Radium is a great example of society blindly placing trust in technology and corporations as these ads from the 1910's show...

- It will cure your hayfever! https://i.imgur.com/yXpONhN.png

- Wear a radium pad for great health! https://i.imgur.com/NlnzYOx.jpg

- Drink Radium water for better health! https://i.imgur.com/d1uIUGO.jpg

Story is explained here https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/03/how-we-re...

...and probably there were people back then saying "Oh more scare stories about Radium again?!?"

Where mobile phones are concerned, I remember my old Ericsson GA628 that used to heat up my ear leaving it red after 5 minutes of conversation.

What's worth bearing in mind is we deployed mobile phones to the public at large before we had any significant data of their long term effects on us. Likewise 5G - we'll only really know what is does to us long term once we've gathered a few years of data, but that's not going to stop us deploying it. So yes it won't immediately kill us but we're deluding ourselves to say we know for sure there's no harm long term.

We have a good idea what 5G does. It heats our bodies by negligible amount. There's no known mechanisms for long-term adverse effects, there's no experimental data supporting such claims.

> There's no known mechanisms for long-term adverse effects, there's no experimental data supporting such claims.

But that's exactly point - there are no _known_ mechanisms. Just like radium in 1910 we didn't know what the mechanism was at that point, if any.

Have we studied the effects of 5G on a large sample of people over a 5 year or 10 year period ? No because 5G hasn't been available that long.

So ultimately we don't know but we're going to do it anyway. Which is OK if we are aware that that's the choice we're making

If there's no hypotheses on how long-term effects can occur, then experimental work becomes p-hacking (read meaningless).

Radium wasn't used for over a century all over the entire planet and exposed to most of the entire population of the world their entire lives. It's literally the worst comparison to non-ionizing radiation possible. I think if there were significant issues with non-ionizing radiation, we would have a large sample size by now since almost everyone is exposed to it their entire life. Also, what is significant about your phone heating up your ear? I can my make ear red with heat by wearing a toque in a warm room, that does not have anything to do with if it causes cancer or not.

My point wasn't about comparing different types of EM radiation - of course there's no comparison.

My point was simply about the process by which society blindly adopts a new technology without fully understanding the consequences and how that might have parallels today.

But its not a new technology, we have been using radio for over 100 years, just because its 5ghz doesn't completely change the physics involved. Sure if this was a drastically new technology like lets say teleportation, it would be a bad idea to blindly use it everywhere without some study into the physical effects. Radio though is very well understood.

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