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Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

I mean, if you're going to cite something you might want to read it first:

“The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,”

...

"In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”"

https://factor.niehs.nih.gov/2018/11/feature/1-feature-radia...

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Really? I guess the radiation doesn't affect your whole body when you're walking down the street and you get close to a cellular tower (you get pretty damn close to them with 5G cells), or say when you take a crowded subway and someone's making a call right next to you (oh and the phone will likely amp up its radiation power in there to be able to hop from tower to tower and maintain a connection in a moving cage of metal). Just two examples out of a million

Edit: how am I dismissing your point? I literally just addressed it. And get off your high horse, as though it is completely wacky to consider that something that permeates your environment could possibly have harmful effects on your body

lol - so you want to cite the study, but when you don't like what it says you just decide that you can dismiss that part of it? Why did I even bother...

You are dismissing the paper's authors when they say "exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience" by assuming they're ignorant of exposure levels and durations that people experience.

It looks like a 5G array puts out about 120 Watts[1], and that's not attempting to calculate drop-off due to distance, while the sun puts out an exposure of 1,000 W/m2[2] on the Earth's surface at much much higher frequencies (5G tops out at 3Ghz, light starts at 430 THz - we know that the greater the frequency the greater the harm). Really, if we are worried about 5G then normal sunlight is in most measures orders of magnitude worse.

[1]https://www.grandmetric.com/2019/03/26/5g-health-issues-expl... [2]https://ag.tennessee.edu/solar/Pages/What%20Is%20Solar%20Ene...

The sun "completely permeates our environment", too. With radiation and energy levels many orders of magnitude higher.

> as though it is completely wacky to consider that something that permeates your environment could possibly have harmful effects on your body

In this case, it kind of is! Human tissue is full of water, and water is a terrible transmission medium for RF energy, with penetration depth decreasing as a function of frequency. This is why submarine radio is receive-only and operates at a rate of characters per minute [1], why fully in-ear Bluetooth earbuds tend to drop out more than other designs, and why I'm not actually worried about low-power GHz-range RF signals like 5G. I'll get skin cancer from sunburns long before I'll get any kind of cancer from thermal radiation that can't even penetrate my stratum corneum.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency

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