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Ask HN: Is 5G Safe?

16 points by antibland ↗ HN
After reading handfuls of articles and watching some videos on 5G, it's still very difficult to discern fact from speculation. Mainstream media is no longer a reliable source for truthful coverage due to many of them being sponsored by the purveyors of this technology (Verizon/Sprint/etc). Can anyone here shed accurate light on any real health concerns associated with 5G proliferation?

19 comments

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aguzzi94
I've watched see video on this very interesting subject a while ago. Take a look at it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbNh7x3lVWc

My opinion is that we still don't know for sure, and anybody who pretends to be sure about a certain position doesn't have a clue in reality.

thrill
So, you know you don't know enough to know, but you know you know enough to know other people don't know?
exo-pla-net
Fearmongering. Our current understanding of physics precludes 5G from having any effect on the human body. 5G is not ionizing: this is a matter of physical reality. And non-ionizing electromagnetic waves lacks the energy to do anything interesting to matter.

The fear is induced by calling electromagnetic waves "radiation," a scary word. If you accurately called these waves "high spectrum light", the fear would evaporate.

The pedantic scientific caution is that our model of electromagnetism may be wrong. Indeed, light may be small demons seeking to enslave us, and only coincidentally behaving in accordance with the Schrödinger equation, but this is unlikely.

And so it is just as reasonable to outlaw rain dances from subsistence farmers in Africa (Our model of cloud formation could be wrong! Who knows what effect these dances could have?), as it is to be worried about 5G.

Myself, I'm looking forward to high resolution, negligible latency VR, as well as no longer having to buy computer hardware: VM's will perform just as well as your tricked out local computer, so it won't make sense to buy computer (or even a smartphone) anymore. The smarts will live in the cloud, and you'll just need a screen, an input device, and a connection to work or game. 5G is coming, so you might as well be excited about it!

aguzzi94
What?! Light is not small evil demons coming from the sun directly into our eyes?! Anyway amazing, I've never thought about the non-hardware perspectives. You got me excited!
noisefilters
I think the key point is that the media outlets are not a reliable source of information. I can tell you that the big wireless providers are working hard to influence local governments to push their agendas. For example, one local non-profit that I know (that advocates for startups and tech in the city) received a sponsorship out of the blue from one of the big wireless companies. They gladly accepted the $7500. A few weeks after, the company was asking the non-profit to give them access to the City, Managers, advocate for 5g, etc. Essentially, they were acting as a lobby and tried to leverage the non-profit for this. Yeah, I know.....its how the system works. But just imagine that this wireless company is doling out $7500 to multiple organizations in every mid-sized city in America (this city is 200k population). It just tells you how important this initiative is to the wireless telcos.
samspenc
My biggest concern with 5G is whether the standards and implementation are being done by [1] companies based in democratic countries, or [2] companies based in non-free (dictatorship-run) countries where the companies have close ties with the regime that runs the country.

Products from companies in the latter bracket seem to have a history of suspiciously simple backdoors and a record of sending data "back home".

wright7
Based on what CIA, NSA and FBI is known for, is USA [1] or [2]?
yokaze
It's not safe, as the tinfoil theories sprung up about 5G technology can make you die from laughter.

It's fricking non-ionising RF. TV stations were sending with much more power than the 5g base stations replacing them.

It's not new (em-)radiation, or more of it, it's only a new use, with actually lower sending power than before.

Better turn your WiFi off, if you fear the water heating 2.1GHz radiation.

noisefilters
You are actually right.....but the issue is that 5g doesnt travel distance well and particularly not thru walls very well. So, those safe frequencies that you mention needs to be amplified and you need a LOT more towers and repeaters to extract the real value of 5g.
yokaze
That's why TV frequencies got freed up (600MHz), and are also used in 5G: they travel great though walls. And one or two stations serviced a city.

The FR1 range is nothing new.

Yes, FR2 ranges (aka mmwave) has more potential for higher speeds partly _because_ it doesn't travel through walls, you need practically line of sight. (Spatial multiplexing).

And you cannot simply amp up the power, to get through it as reflections will drown you.

Different use-cases, different frequencies.

And those frequencies are still non-ionising, and at most heat your skin.

So why the qualifier of "safe" for frequencies? We are talking radio here, not UV, x-ray or gamma.

rhoyerboat
Any research biologist I know would balk at the idea that anyone outside of people that have had access to 5g in a bio lab for 10 years could even have a credible starting point from which to answer this question.
gus_massa
Non ionizing radiation is safe. Ionizing radiation (gamma rays, x-rays, some uv rays) are dangerous when the dose is high.

The main problem with multimedia is that they don't have some specialist to cover the news and they just copy&paste the press release of any study floating around. So they make a big scandal about in a study that report like 20 subexperiments and only one of them is statistically significant with p < 0.05.

tzs
> Non ionizing radiation is safe.

The assorted things that have burned or exploded when I left them in my microwave oven too long suggest that this is not entirely correct.

Ionizing things is not the only mechanism by which radiation can cause harm. It's the only one known to be able to cause cancer, which seems to be the main thing people worry about, so it would be accurate to say non-ionizing radiation cannot cause cancer.

The non-ionizing ways radiation causes harm also tend to require high intensity and prolonged exposure, so it is probably accurate to say you don't have to worry about them unless you make a habit of, say, hanging out directly in front of high power microwave antennas.

greyfade
You realize your microwave operates at over 1100 watts in a small enclosure designed to reflect RF, while 5G currently maxes out at 1100 watts in an open space that dissipates the energy in all directions, right?

You also realize that a microwave is designed to use a frequency band that sympathetically excites hydrogen atoms, while 5G is a collection of technologies that use UHF, high microwave, and submillimeter bands that do not sympathetically excite hydrogen, right?

gus_massa
I agree.

Climbing to the top of a 5G antena while it is working and hugging will probably get you a few burns.

I also worked for some months with infrared and green laser that were powerful enough to cause eye damage. And if you want a less technological example, with a glass lens you can concentrate sunlight and burn many things.

gormandizer
> Non ionizing radiation is safe.

Perhaps a better statement would be, "Non ionizing radiation is safe when RF exposure guidelines are followed."

underyx
At Astroscreen[0] we're working on analyzing the activity around #Stop5G and related Twitter discussions. We haven't published a full report yet, but I can reveal preliminarily that we found manipulation by a network of bad actors (one random member is [1]) who tried to artificially spread disinformation about the risks of 5G technology.

[0]: https://www.astroscreen.com

[1]: https://twitter.com/WarriorWifeMom