Thanks! I'm glad I'm not the only one. And exactly - it's such a massive jump that it deserves a careful look, which it doesn't seem like it really has gotten so far. I'm not saying it's going to give people cancer, but we just don't know what it may or may not do. Maybe there are absolutely no side effects. Maybe it's even beneficial to health! Hell, exposure to enough EM radiation in the hundreds of nanometers range is actually a requirement for human health.
But maybe it has a negative effect on anything from birds to bacteria to humans, and I think it's worth investigating that before we deploy it extremely rapidly in all of the world's cities.
I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. And that's a bridge, which humans have been building for some 20,000 years. And it's made out of one thing - steel - which we generally understand very well.
I really hope there will be no side effects. But the chance that there will scares me a bit. 5G will be rapidly rolled out at enormous, unprecedented scale and density in nearly all the big world cities - and in 2020 most of the world lives in cities.
>> I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area.
No it isn't. The engineers knew this sound was going to happen. It was not accidental.
Apparently the noise on the pedestrian path itself is powerful enough that some people report it is literally unbearable while walking in the wind. From what I've read, the engineers only predicted that there would be some amount of hum, not that it would be nearly this loud.
And again, the things involved here are bridges (which humans have been making for some 14,000 years) and wind (familiar to humans for our entire existence.) 5G uses little-studied frequencies around 50 GHz that we really know extremely little about compared to the widely used cm-wave.
But maybe it has a negative effect on anything from birds to bacteria to humans, and I think it's worth investigating that before we deploy it extremely rapidly in all of the world's cities.
I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. And that's a bridge, which humans have been building for some 20,000 years. And it's made out of one thing - steel - which we generally understand very well.
I really hope there will be no side effects. But the chance that there will scares me a bit. 5G will be rapidly rolled out at enormous, unprecedented scale and density in nearly all the big world cities - and in 2020 most of the world lives in cities.