Why exactly does wifi not cause cancer / be really unhealthy for you?
NOTE: This is for my mother as she is really really worried about this especially with Routers and Phones
In: Technology
The world health organization recently listed radiofrequency radiation as a possible carcinogen. Most studies on this are inconclusive on their finding as to whether or not RF radiation causes cancer or not, inconclusive is distinctly different from “does not cause cancer” or no link found. The answer is, we don’t know. What we do know is RF radiation is non-ionizing which means it doesn’t knock off electrons in the molecules it hits like x-rays do which causes damage to DNA.
https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf
The wavelength of the WiFi signal is too big to disrupt dna in your cells. Its radiation (any energy being radiated is radiation) but it’s non ionizing.
Gama rays and x rays are small enough to actually damage the dna in your cells and that causes cancer.
Power level also has an effect. Your router is only putting out a few miliwatts where your microwave oven that uses the same frequency band puts out 800-1200 watts
Every electrical conductor, of any length or size, is also a radio transmitter. All the wiring of the power lines, in your walls, in your toaster. Even florescent lights give off RF radiation. So does a flashlight, when turned on. The entire planet is completely and entirely awash in EM and RF radiation, your mother, everyone, everything. Then we have our noisy neighbor, the sun, that releases all sorts of radiation, a fair amount of it that passes right through the whole entire planet like we’re not even here.
The point I’m making is not to frighten or shock, but to highlight the magnitude of your mother’s ignorance. She has no idea what she’s talking about, she’s so wrapped up in worrying about WiFi of all fucking things that she hasn’t even bothered or is incapable of conceiving the sheer magnitude of it all.
Such fears and concerns are vastly overstated, there are far deadlier and more dangerous things we are exposed to – thing we ACTUALLY KNOW FOR A FACT ARE CARCINOGENS, that the very dubious question of whether WiFi can cause cancer or not is not of any real concern.
I’ll illustrate.
If you live in the US, all American grown tobacco is 100% nuclear fucking radioactive. Back in the 50s, lobbyists got a law passed allowing tobacco farmers to use apatite, a phosphorous rich mineral, as a fertilizer. The problem with this stuff is it’s porous, and over millions of years, sucked up every radioactive isotope that mineral has ever seen. It’s not the mineral itself that’s radioactive, but it’s all the trace elements it’s picked up. How radioactive is it? Well, the US is seeing all-time lows in smoking, but all-time highs in death from tobacco related products, including 2nd hand and 3rd hand smoking. And it’s not because we’re tracking the data differently. Smoking in the 50s, before the use of this mineral, was not this dangerous. A pack a day smoker is subjecting themselves to ~2,000 chest X-rays a year (the recommended safe exposure limit is 4 per year), and the smoke they exhale is also radioactive, so just BEING IN THE SAME SPACE as where smokers have smoked, even if you can’t smell old smoke, you’re exposed to higher than background. All that smoke doesn’t just “blow away”, it settles, all around everywhere a smoker smokes, in their car, in their house. And cancer risk is accumulative, which is why 3rd hand – contact exposure because these people are covered in their own radioactive filth, is a big fucking deal for babies. Cigarettes set off radiation detectors in cargo ports and shipping yards, and they’re handled as HAZMAT materials in bulk.
And what’s worse is that since smoking is under such great decline, old tobacco fields are being repurposed for food production. It’s also yet another example of what makes farm runoff so dangerous.
Now we all have an intuitive understanding of radiation and it’s cancerous dangers. We know this stuff is bad news and your mother is so desensitized to this very actually real threat to her life and welfare that she thinks something we haven’t been able to decide whether or not causes cancer for over 100 years, fucking RADIO, is her biggest concern right now?
And if all that about tobacco scares you, as it should, then when you hear the phrase “chemical carcinogen”, you should be shitting your god damn pants right now. It’s not just the apatite in the tobacco that makes it a carcinogen, but the act of combustion, when you burn the cigarette, by definition produces tar and other byproducts of that combustion. Many of these new chemicals are chemically active and stable. These are chemical carcinogens, and they can enter your body, and stick around for years, and they can bounce around and unzip your DNA like a pair of pants. When your DNA tries to reassemble, and if it does so with errors, you can get a cancer that holds.
And this is true of not just tobacco, but there are a number of cleaning products and otherwise seemingly mundane substances all around you, in your house, in your car, you might smell some things outside that mean you’re already exposed to chemical carcinogens. And this stuff is aggressive, way more than the billiard ball shootout of decaying radioactive isotopes.
We’ve figured out a lot of things are carcinogens in no god damn time, we’ve had radio since 1899 and we still don’t know? I think the fear it may be carcinogenic may itself just be a witch hunt by those who really really want to champion something and be right, and that for over 100 years they haven’t been, it gives them something to complain about and feel fulfilled.
WiFi routers and telephones typically operate at frequencies between 0.7 and 5 gigahertz. (Technically there are a number of very specific bands allocated by standards organizations in different countries, for these applications.)
What’s not widely understood is that liquid water and thus your own body itself, is a strong source of radio waves in the range of Ghz.
This is by virtue of being warmer than absolute zero. This is thermal radiation, although the peak emissivity occurs farther up the spectrum in the range of infrared. Some weather satellites monitor these frequencies as a means of analyzing sea surface temperatures.
For this reason rainy weather interferes with cell phone transmission.
Overall the human body radiates roughly 50-100W depending on activity level, overall skin temperature, and body size. In the range of GHz the body emits several watts of power.
A typical WiFi router has a max power of about 0.5 watts. Usual level is around 100mW or 0.1 W. The main difference is the emissions are concentrated in a very narrow band with these devices while the body’s emissions are broad spectrum.
So the idea that radio wave emissions from a WiFi router are somehow more dangerous than the body’s own thermal emissions which are more powerful, is ignorant luddite-type nonsense.
Because the electromagnetic waves which WiFi are, is not powerful enough to cause damage to your cells (the proper term would be non-ionizing).
For example, nuclear radiation and scary stuff like Gamma Rays are super powerful and contains a lot of energy, they are also ionizing rays, so they can cause a lot of damage to your cells. When your cells get damaged, they mutate and cause cancer.
Microwaves (Not the electrical appliance, but rather the technology behind the electrical appliance) and radiowaves (like radios) do not cause harm because those waves are too weak and contains too less energy to be harmful.
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