Thread by @ErrataRob

Many wonder about "5G risks". Is there anything here serious people should care about? Or is it wholly a thing for crank conspiracy theorists?

The answer is that it's only crank conspiracy theory.

I mention this because of a recent Scientific American op-ed by an academic declaring that we have no reason to believe 5G is safe. It has an air of legitimacy.
blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/w…

It's certainly true that we have no reason to believe 5G is safe. But at the same time, we have no reason to believe it's unsafe, either. That's the flaw from that SciAm op-ed, those 500 articles it cites can also be read as demonstrating there's no reason to believe 5G is unsafe

"Safe" is a relative term. Let's say that world-wide adoption of 5G means that 10 people (roughly 1-in-a-billion) will die each year due to the effects of radiation. Does that mean we shouldn't adopt 5G?

Well, 40k people in the United States die each year due to traffic accidents, yet we haven't gotten rid of all cars and roads. Hundreds die each year from furniture falling on them, but we haven't gotten rid of furniture. Stairs within homes cause deaths every year, ...

There may be health effects from 5G. It is non-ionizing radiation, so it won't directly cause cancer like X-rays would. But there might be some secondary effect, like stimulating chemical reactions in the skin that does damage DNA and lead to cancer.

Or, non-cancer effects. Imagine a sci-fi scenario where 5G radiation, which gets absorbed in the first few millimeters of the skin, leads to an outbreak of disfiguring warts in the entire population.

Now that 2G, 3G, and 4G have been deployed, we have lots of "epidemiological" data that shows conclusively that if there is a health effect, it's so small that even if it can be measured, it still causes fewer health problems than stairs and furniture.

5G will work the same. Once deployed, we'll have data. That data may show we need to reconsider and get rid of it. But no such data exists now. All the data we have implies that it probably won't have any significant problems.

Anyway, the point of these tweets wasn't so much 5G crank theories, but risk analysis in fields like cybersecurity. Analyzing "risk" doesn't mean getting rid of all risk. If your cellphone had a 1-in-a-billion chance of killing you, would you get rid of it? Of course you wouldn't

All the research on mobile phone radio waves doesn't conclusively prove it's 100% safe. But it does show it's at least 99.99...% safe. If there is actually a risk, then it's very very small.

The original tweet was about whether there is seriousness here, or just conspiracy theory. In response to this thread, I get comments like "240 scientists have signed an open letter", like at this link. The list isn't scientists, but cranks with PhDs.
emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-…

For example, there's "Dr. Lisa Tully, Ph.D., Energy Medicine Research Institute, Boulder, CO, USA". This "institute" certifies "energy" products, you know, those scam products that fill up your spam folders.
energymedicineri.com/energy-medicin…

I'm not impressed by long lists of cranks with PhDs. I would, however, take seriously a short list of scientists without cranks on the list. The point is that there is no such short list, only long lists full of cranks.