If you take any trend in any direction and extrapolate it linearly, you will always wind up with an absurd number. I lost two pounds this week. At this rate I'll be dead in a year or two and weigh negative 50 pounds on the third.
I assure that this is not your fate. Eventually you'd become so large that you collapse into a black hole, and then you'd slowly evaporate due to Hawking Radiation. Nature has a feedback mechanism for everything.
Speaking of absurd extrapolations, at the current population growth rate, the human race will have used all the particules in the universe in only 8604 years.
https://youtu.be/lpj0E0a0mlU
> More low-level radiation access? (smartphones/computers/smartwatches)
I don't get why people are so worried about this. The effects are so small, it is almost like worrying about undesirable side effects of homeopathy. (What if all this healthy "information" in the water also makes cancer cells more healthy?)
Compared to that, the effects of more and more sugar consumption are huge and quickly visible. Same for missing physical activity.
Also, much larger effects come from dirty drinking water, with "dirty" in every sense: chemical, biological, etc. Some countries even resort to chlorinate all their drinking water because they finally gave up keeping their water clean.
Or, fine particulates in cities who fail to keep their air clean (read: almost all cities).
These are real issues with huge effects. No need to exaggerate on tiny effects like wifi radiation, unless you are talking about nuclear radiation caused by vulcans or more recently, malfunctioning nuclear plants.
Are you suggesting that microwave oven doesn't work because it doesn't use ionizing radiation? Nonionizing radiation CAN have effects on humans, and current regulations are only based on temperature effects i.e a proxy like a SAR value. But there can be many effects of nonionizing radiation even before it raises tissue temperature level.
I believe michaelmrose is suggesting that while microwaves are indeed a form of (electromagnetic) radiation, "low-level radiation" usually refers to low-levels of ionizing radiation, not low-power EM sources. While fwdslash might indeed be talking about low-level microwaves, there are many in my experience who think that "radiation" only means "ionizing radiation" or "atomic radiation". (Hence, "nuke it in the microwave".)
Again, in my experience, people who are aware of the distinction tend to write "More low-power microwaves" than "More low-level radiation".
One of the latter is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17886009 where you can see "low-level radiation" is used to describe microwaves: "On the radar station area, blue tits nested in high exposed nest-boxes (67,0%) and great tit occupied mainly these boxes, which were exposed to low-level radiation", where that radiation is "pulse-modulated microwave radiation of 1,200-3,000 MHz."
It's just not common.
The topic, by the way, concerns sperm counts. You write "there can be many effects". Is a change in sperm count one of them? Many people have done experiments on the effect of microwaves from mobile phones on organisms. I was at a biology conference about 25 years ago where one of the speakers talked about their research, so surely this has been tested already.
Also, radio and TV techs have been working with high-power EM for decades. There's so much power in the air around some towers that florescent tubes can glow. If low-power microwaves have an effect on fertility then we should have seen an effect on those workers long ago, yes?
Not necessarily, what if it is long term effect? What if it is some kind of resonance involved, i.e. it only shows it face when there is certain geometry and frequency present? Plus there were some courts rulings about phones causing cancer ... [1]
As I kid I visited a broadcast transmitter up on the mountains with its own hydropower generator. There was staff on-site who had worked there for years. How long do you think is needed to compare working 8 hours a day at a 500kW radio transmitter broadcasting all the time vs. holding a smartphone or using wifi with only a few hundred milliwatts? (mW values at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm .) Again, there's enough RF power from the transmitter to make a florescent bulb glow.
The biophysics would pretty incredible, even unbelievable, for a certain geometry and frequency to make a difference. Microwaves are a few centimeters long, and longer than sperm or even the testes. What mechanism could make them so specific to frequency?
But putting that aside, different countries use different frequencies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_frequencies says "Many GSM phones support three bands (900/1,800/1,900 MHz or 850/1,800/1,900 MHz) or four bands (850/900/1,800/1,900 MHz), and are usually referred to as tri-band and quad-band phones, or world phones; with such a phone one can travel internationally and use the same handset.")
If there were a significant problem with one specific frequency then it would appear in an epidemiology comparison.
Fundamentally though, your line of questioning can have no end. What if it only affects people with one of about 30 point mutations? What if it's only for those who have a diet with an excess of selenium? What if it's only at a certain power level? What if ... what if .. what if?
Each of these is hard to test, and given the difficulty of the biophysics it's hard to justify spending a lot of money when other options, including "More refined sugar?" and "Less physical activity?", seem more likely.
My ex-gf has worked in fertility clinic and we were talking about it a lot at home. What I recall is that there are couple of reasons: siting, obesity, alcohol consumption and smoking among others. It is not like there is just one thing that is happening. There are speculations that another factor is high level of woman hormones in drinking water.
I find it interesting that count of sperm that did label you as an infertile (or at least in problematic category) during 70s is now considered completely ok.
That is especially true in Germany. Post-Second World War education included that boys showing strength is evil.
I still remember being shushed by the kindergarten teacher when I played with a banana (I used it as a pistol and made shooting sounds). That game was fine with my dad at home (we're from a different culture). I remember a couple of other things like that. For instance in school, fights between boys were shut down quickly and there were no consequences - "it was no one's fault" and violence is evil while at home my dad told me that it is the fault of the one who started fighting and it is fine to protect oneself.
Content marketing for my recruiting startup from here: A more normal understanding of protecting oneself and gender roles was one of the reasons why I moved away from Germany to Switzerland. But there were other factors, too: "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in tech" https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...).
Interestingly, in the modern US, I've heard (no children of my own) that they often consider a fight between two school kids both kids' fault, sometimes even when the target doesn't fight back, which I find ridiculous. "Sorry, kid, you shouldn't have been an attractive target for bullies."
All of those things are found in those other regions.
The high hormones in drinking water might be the most likely cause. Or it might be something really strange like chemtrails or something in the milk we all drink.
Taking a trend with an unknown cause and extrapolating seems unlikely to yield accurate predictions. The actual news here is that in USA and Europe, male sperm counts have fallen 50-60% between 1973 and 2011. That's alarming enough on its own without sensational headlines like this.
If it is indeed due to our increasingly toxic environment, then we should perform studies based on different diets and the types of foods each group consumes. My hypothesis is that our food sources are huge culprits here.
>if the data on sperm counts is extrapolated to its logical conclusion, men will have little or no reproductive capacity from 2060 onwards.
No, that's not extrapolating to its logical conclusion. That's extrapolating a trend as if it will continue without changing. In reality, even at these lower levels, sperm counts are considered in the normal range.
"Even in adults, exposure to chemicals, such as bisphenol A, which are thought to affect fertility, can have a negative effect"
BPA is very common in paper receipts you get when buying stuff from the store. A study in JAMA showed that for people who handle receipts often, it is detectable in urine:
37 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 84.7 ms ] thread> I grew 182cm in the first 40 years of my life, By that rate I will be more than 3.5m tall in my eighties.
Still, this is alarming that we don't know why this happens.
More refined sugar?
Less physical activity?
I really wonder what it could be, though.
I don't get why people are so worried about this. The effects are so small, it is almost like worrying about undesirable side effects of homeopathy. (What if all this healthy "information" in the water also makes cancer cells more healthy?)
Compared to that, the effects of more and more sugar consumption are huge and quickly visible. Same for missing physical activity.
Also, much larger effects come from dirty drinking water, with "dirty" in every sense: chemical, biological, etc. Some countries even resort to chlorinate all their drinking water because they finally gave up keeping their water clean.
Or, fine particulates in cities who fail to keep their air clean (read: almost all cities).
These are real issues with huge effects. No need to exaggerate on tiny effects like wifi radiation, unless you are talking about nuclear radiation caused by vulcans or more recently, malfunctioning nuclear plants.
For more info look up ionizing radiation.
Again, in my experience, people who are aware of the distinction tend to write "More low-power microwaves" than "More low-level radiation".
For a semblance of hard numbers, "low-level radiation" gives 735 hits in PubMed Central (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=%22low-level+radiatio... ) and 338 in PubMed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%22low-level+radia... ).
'"low-level radiation" microwave" gives 32 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=%22low-level+radiatio... ) and 2 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%22low-level+radia... ), respectively.
One of the latter is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17886009 where you can see "low-level radiation" is used to describe microwaves: "On the radar station area, blue tits nested in high exposed nest-boxes (67,0%) and great tit occupied mainly these boxes, which were exposed to low-level radiation", where that radiation is "pulse-modulated microwave radiation of 1,200-3,000 MHz."
It's just not common.
The topic, by the way, concerns sperm counts. You write "there can be many effects". Is a change in sperm count one of them? Many people have done experiments on the effect of microwaves from mobile phones on organisms. I was at a biology conference about 25 years ago where one of the speakers talked about their research, so surely this has been tested already.
Also, radio and TV techs have been working with high-power EM for decades. There's so much power in the air around some towers that florescent tubes can glow. If low-power microwaves have an effect on fertility then we should have seen an effect on those workers long ago, yes?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/21/italian-c...
As I kid I visited a broadcast transmitter up on the mountains with its own hydropower generator. There was staff on-site who had worked there for years. How long do you think is needed to compare working 8 hours a day at a 500kW radio transmitter broadcasting all the time vs. holding a smartphone or using wifi with only a few hundred milliwatts? (mW values at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm .) Again, there's enough RF power from the transmitter to make a florescent bulb glow.
The biophysics would pretty incredible, even unbelievable, for a certain geometry and frequency to make a difference. Microwaves are a few centimeters long, and longer than sperm or even the testes. What mechanism could make them so specific to frequency?
But putting that aside, different countries use different frequencies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_frequencies says "Many GSM phones support three bands (900/1,800/1,900 MHz or 850/1,800/1,900 MHz) or four bands (850/900/1,800/1,900 MHz), and are usually referred to as tri-band and quad-band phones, or world phones; with such a phone one can travel internationally and use the same handset.")
If there were a significant problem with one specific frequency then it would appear in an epidemiology comparison.
Fundamentally though, your line of questioning can have no end. What if it only affects people with one of about 30 point mutations? What if it's only for those who have a diet with an excess of selenium? What if it's only at a certain power level? What if ... what if .. what if?
Each of these is hard to test, and given the difficulty of the biophysics it's hard to justify spending a lot of money when other options, including "More refined sugar?" and "Less physical activity?", seem more likely.
I find it interesting that count of sperm that did label you as an infertile (or at least in problematic category) during 70s is now considered completely ok.
I still remember being shushed by the kindergarten teacher when I played with a banana (I used it as a pistol and made shooting sounds). That game was fine with my dad at home (we're from a different culture). I remember a couple of other things like that. For instance in school, fights between boys were shut down quickly and there were no consequences - "it was no one's fault" and violence is evil while at home my dad told me that it is the fault of the one who started fighting and it is fine to protect oneself.
Content marketing for my recruiting startup from here: A more normal understanding of protecting oneself and gender roles was one of the reasons why I moved away from Germany to Switzerland. But there were other factors, too: "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in tech" https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...).
The high hormones in drinking water might be the most likely cause. Or it might be something really strange like chemtrails or something in the milk we all drink.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/03/pesticides-res...
>if the data on sperm counts is extrapolated to its logical conclusion, men will have little or no reproductive capacity from 2060 onwards.
No, that's not extrapolating to its logical conclusion. That's extrapolating a trend as if it will continue without changing. In reality, even at these lower levels, sperm counts are considered in the normal range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
BPA is very common in paper receipts you get when buying stuff from the store. A study in JAMA showed that for people who handle receipts often, it is detectable in urine:
http://www.newsweek.com/youre-absorbing-bpa-your-receipts-st...
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/18/modern-life-rough-o...