The year is 2021, and though the rollout of5g technology has been slow, your town finally got all the fancy new antennas and cell phone towers installed that will make
it possible for phones to connect to the 5g network.
Excited to try out lightning fast internet anywhere you go, you pull out your phone and hop on youtube to watch another episode of your favourite informative online show.
But as your phone connects to the 5g network, your nose suddenly starts bleeding.
Your hands shake and your vision gets blurry, then suddenly, your head pops like an overripe melon or that one scene from scanners.
You're dead now, and it's all because you just had to have 5g cell service on your phone.
Clearly, the previous scenario is hyperbole, but as 5g technology comes closer to being an international reality, people all across the world are having some very real fears about what this
First though, what is 5g, and how is it going to change the way we communicate?
5g is the latest development in wireless information transfer technology.
The G in 5g stands for generation, so this is the fifth generation of cellular technology, which is impressive since the tech has only really been about a few decades.
5G is poised to change humanity in a very big way, and in fact, maybe the single biggest revolution in human culture since the global adoption of the internet.
That's because 5g technology will allow information transfer rates as high as a stunning twenty gigabytes per second, which is faster than most wired connections.
More bandwidth and improved antenna technology will make it possible to share more data, faster, anywhere within network coverage.
We could see latency drop to as low as 1 millisecond, meaning that for the first time wireless augmented reality technology could become a real thing.
This means that you could play virtual reality games anywhere that you have coverage, but it would also allow for things like remote surgery in more places.
The military is already looking to applications of 5g technology, and dream of a heads-up display system that would let soldiers share real-time data across the battlefield, or let ground combat
drone operators to control battlefield robots alongside human soldiers in real-time.
Needless to say, the ability to stream so much data so quickly anywhere with coverage could be revolutionary.
5g works differently from 4g by replacing large, high power cell towers with many more cell stations spread out across a city.
This is one disadvantage of 5g tech, in testing users reported dropping out of service when more than two blocks away from a tower, telecommunications companies are going to have
to invest heftily into outfitting each city with thousands of new antennas.
Luckily, these antennas are far smaller than normal cell phone towers and can be inconspicuously worked into light poles or the roofs of buildings.
This means that the electromagnetic waves5g uses for communications are much smaller than those used for regular cell service, and are thus much more prone to interference and have far shorter ranges.
Right now companies in the US, Japan, SouthKorea and China are building the first 5g networks, and its estimated that a full rollout of the technology will cost billions of
However the benefits far outweigh the steep price, or even the wait, and 5g promises to make a truly interconnected world a reality.
But with every new technology, comes fear from the public sector, and now some people are opposing the rollout of 5g technology on the grounds that it is dangerous to human health.
The reason for the fear behind 5g largely comes from the very high frequencies that the technology uses to transmit data.
5G operates at the same frequency that microwaves do, and sadly a general lack of scientific knowledge has led many people around the world to fear that 5g could literally cook your brain.
As many scientists have pointed out though, it's not the wavelength that makes microwaves cook food so effectively, but the power that the microwave puts out.
The average microwave puts out 700 watts of power, while a cell phone barely puts out a single watt.
Further, microwaves concentrate all of that energy into a very confined space, while your cell phone spits out its energy all over the environment.
A woman in New Zealand made headlines after starting an online petition to ban the rollout of 5g technology, fearful of the effects the network would have on the human body.
As is so often the case, the woman first grew concerned when she read a Facebook post about the dangers of 5g technology, and since Facebook is world-renowned as a trusted,
peer-reviewed authority on all scientific matters, she immediately launched an online petition asking her local government to stop the rollout of 5g technology in her city.
According to the woman, she feared what the effects of 5g exposure 24 hours a day would do to the human body.
She is hardly alone however in fearing the rollout of 5g technology, and in April of this year a test rollout was halted in Brussels, Belgium, after citizens became concerned over
This forced local government to enact anti-radiation laws, which we wish them good luck in enforcing as we are literally bathed in electromagnetic radiation every day.
In fact, we have bad news for Brussels, because every time their citizens enjoy a sunny day they are being blasted by electromagnetic radiation.
Time to ban the sun, Belgium, except don't think hiding indoors will save you because of those light bulbs in your home?
The culprit here is as so often is ignorance of science and scientific terms.
Radiation is used to describe every single electromagnetic emission in the universe, and these include everything from the sun'swarm light to your light bulb or the waves that carry your
The difference between benign and harmful radiation is whether it is ionizing or not, that is whether it is strong enough to remove electrons from their orbit around an atom, thus
The split between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation occurs in the Ultraviolet range, and rest assured, 5g technology falls far short of this point.
Now non-ionizing radiation can still be dangerous, as it can still generate heat and thus destroy living tissue.
But once more we have to consider the power that the radiation is transmitted at, and as we mentioned before, your cell phone simply doesn't have the oomph to hurt you
For fun we looked at some of the more popular conspiracy theories surrounding 5G technology because on the internet ignorance is in no short supply.
One of our favourites was that 5G technology was being used as a form of global population control, which we assume means that all previous methods attempted were complete failures.
Everything from GMO crops to vaccines to chemtrails to dog farts has been claimed by conspiracy theorists at some point or another as being forms of population control, and yet humanity
continues growing despite our apparent best efforts to prevent this.
Either this means that these conspiracy theories are nonsense, or the government is really, really bad at its job.
Another favourite theory is the autism theory, because apparently blaming the mercury in vaccines for causing autism is slowly going out of style, so it's time to blame cell phones.
First of all, the original mercury used in vaccines never caused autism because the dose was so small and the body couldn't physically absorb it, and the new version of mercury
Plus, you can always get a mercury-free vaccine if you happen to be scared of nonsense.
Well, we're not quite sure how that's supposed to work as the EM waves are given off by radiation are so weak and scientists have confirmed that electromagnetic radiation is at least
Another theory put forth is that 5g technology uses high-frequency waves that are capable of boiling water, and thus this is going to be used to make everyone on earth sterile.
This theory is, of course, half-right, as yes,5g technology uses the same high-frequency waves your microwave puts out, but as we've mentioned twice now and really can't stress enough-
it's not just frequency you have to worry about, but power output.
Besides, we have it on good authority that the Zeta Reticuli reptilians who secretly rule the government have no interest in turning humanity sterile, as it would dramatically lower their delicious.
Also, we're not sure how boiling the water in the human body would make you sterile.
If this were possible it would just make you dead, which on second thought, we have to admit is a pretty good way of making people stop having babies.
It's clear some people are fearful of 5G technology, in no small part thanks to a general ignorance of science and the fear associated with the word radiation.
Comments
Post a Comment