It’s absolutely not inherently wrong or implausible to assume that the constant and rather direct exposure over decades causes cancer.
Old timey radio operators definitely died earlier. They had much higher cancer rates. Granted, completely different levels of radiation, but radiation damage is stochastic. If there is an effect at all, it will cause thousands of new cases even low doses simply because we have like 7 billion phone users.
Doing proper studies on that is hard, but absolutely necessary.
Really I’m gonna need a source for that old timey radio claim. Because that sounds like it’s made up and even if it’s not, correlation does not mean causation.
There is no known mechanism for non ionizing radiation to have ANY effect on the human body or individual cells besides from a warming effect. And even the warming effect is quite small, there are normally a lot of other factors that have a way bigger effect on the temperature. See the Mythbusters episode where they tried to warm a chicken on a radar emitter. The turning of the radar cooled it down more than any warming from the radar did.
If there is any truth to claims that non ionizing radiation harms humans, physicists would be all over that. That would mean new physics in an area where there hasn’t been any new stuff for a long time now.
But it turns out we understand it pretty well and see no mechanism for any harm to occur. In that context all of the studies that find no relation are meaningful. If there seems to be no relation and there isn’t a mechanism to do anything, why would anybody think there is anything to find? Turns out it always comes down to FUD, to further some kind of an agenda.
Right? Like they’re trying to equivocate and act like radio waves are this strange thing that science doesn’t quite understand yet, when in reality they’re unbelievably well-understood, and it’d be ridiculous to insinuate that radio waves passing through your body perturb it in any even remotely harmful way. The only reason this study had to exist is because of a bunch of psychotic quacks and grifters who say this kind of thing with zero evidence.
You would get more damaging radiation from the potassium-40 in a single banana than you would spending your entire life immersed in humanity’s ocean of RF waves, and that’s because a radio photon isn’t fucking ionizing.
Yeah, but biological systems have evolved to survive a baseline level of radiation, so there’s a threshold below which damage is repairable. The main reason for the linear dosage/effect curve being used in the literature is computational convenience. And even then, it depends on the effect. Heating effects, for example, may be fundamentally stochastic, but they’re subject to the laws of thermodynamics, so no matter how long your 100-mw source attempts to heat something, it will never boil. And it’ll still never boil if you run the experiment in parallel a million times.
Anyway, I think the stochasticity you’re referring to is more relevant to ionizing radiation. Mobile phones don’t emit that.
It’s absolutely not inherently wrong or implausible to assume that the constant and rather direct exposure over decades causes cancer.
Old timey radio operators definitely died earlier. They had much higher cancer rates. Granted, completely different levels of radiation, but radiation damage is stochastic. If there is an effect at all, it will cause thousands of new cases even low doses simply because we have like 7 billion phone users.
Doing proper studies on that is hard, but absolutely necessary.
Really I’m gonna need a source for that old timey radio claim. Because that sounds like it’s made up and even if it’s not, correlation does not mean causation.
There is no known mechanism for non ionizing radiation to have ANY effect on the human body or individual cells besides from a warming effect. And even the warming effect is quite small, there are normally a lot of other factors that have a way bigger effect on the temperature. See the Mythbusters episode where they tried to warm a chicken on a radar emitter. The turning of the radar cooled it down more than any warming from the radar did.
If there is any truth to claims that non ionizing radiation harms humans, physicists would be all over that. That would mean new physics in an area where there hasn’t been any new stuff for a long time now.
But it turns out we understand it pretty well and see no mechanism for any harm to occur. In that context all of the studies that find no relation are meaningful. If there seems to be no relation and there isn’t a mechanism to do anything, why would anybody think there is anything to find? Turns out it always comes down to FUD, to further some kind of an agenda.
Right? Like they’re trying to equivocate and act like radio waves are this strange thing that science doesn’t quite understand yet, when in reality they’re unbelievably well-understood, and it’d be ridiculous to insinuate that radio waves passing through your body perturb it in any even remotely harmful way. The only reason this study had to exist is because of a bunch of psychotic quacks and grifters who say this kind of thing with zero evidence.
You would get more damaging radiation from the potassium-40 in a single banana than you would spending your entire life immersed in humanity’s ocean of RF waves, and that’s because a radio photon isn’t fucking ionizing.
Yeah, but biological systems have evolved to survive a baseline level of radiation, so there’s a threshold below which damage is repairable. The main reason for the linear dosage/effect curve being used in the literature is computational convenience. And even then, it depends on the effect. Heating effects, for example, may be fundamentally stochastic, but they’re subject to the laws of thermodynamics, so no matter how long your 100-mw source attempts to heat something, it will never boil. And it’ll still never boil if you run the experiment in parallel a million times.
Anyway, I think the stochasticity you’re referring to is more relevant to ionizing radiation. Mobile phones don’t emit that.