5G, it’s already being tested in many parts of the world and most flagship phones now support it and it promises speeds up to two Gbps. That is two GB per second. With that speed, you could download an entire season of TV shows within seconds. But with new technology comes the question of, is it safe? What are the health effects of 5G?

And with it, conspiracy theories like 5G causes cancer, 5G can be used to control us. 5G is being used to spread the coronavirus. We’ll talk about all that.

What is 5G?

First of all, what is 5G? 5G basically stands for the fifth generation of wireless data transfer technology. It’s basically the next step after 4G. It allows, massively fast internet speeds with very low latency this would enhance connectivity for users and devices.

Advantages of 5G:

You can download files faster. You can watch videos in Full HD and buffering would be a thing of the past, like floppy disks. We could have fleets of driverless cars managed on this steady and fast network. Driverless cars can communicate with each other and avoid collisions. Surgeons can perform surgery over the internet. The surgeon can be in the UK and can perform surgery on a patient in Africa using robots. Everything we use from our toasters to our showerheads to our running shoes can be connected to the Internet of Things. And this would all work very seamlessly because of the low latency.

5G is going to be the future of the internet. We might even stop needing optical fibres, modems and Wi-Fi routers and all of these things are going to be things of the past.

Health Effects of 5G:

So this is a great technology, right? At least it sounds like one, but instead of being overjoyed about the possibilities, why are people worried about the risks. It is human nature and evolutionary trait to be worried about new and uncertain things. What are the health effects of 5g? Whenever a new or an unknown factor is introduced into human surroundings, the first response is fear, anxiety and caution?

It’s important to have this trait, say, if you didn’t have this trait a million years ago, we would have probably all gotten killed or eaten alive. So it is a good trait here to be cautious and anxious, especially when a word like radiation is attached to it. But too much caution is also a bad thing.

If we were too afraid of fire, we would have never learned to control it and use it for benefit. If we were afraid of flying, we would have never been to space. So the right way to deal with new technology is to know what it is and how it works. 5G is a type of electromagnetic radiation, just like light, but with much lesser frequency.

Visible light has frequencies ranging from 400 to 790 terahertz. Whereas 4G has frequencies ranging from 600 megahertz to six gigahertz. Now 5G has frequencies ranging from 28 gigahertz to 300 gigahertz, which is still way lesser than that of light. About 1,000 times lesser.

Can 5G cause cancer?

Now for radiation to cause cancer, it has to break bonds in the DNA of our cells and to break bonds, it needs a significant amount of energy. It needs enough energy to knock off electrons from the outermost orbits of the item to make the item ionized, thus break the molecule structure in the DNA.

Now this alteration in our DNA happens quite regularly in our bodies, but that doesn’t develop into cancer because there are a ton of protective measures to protect against the development of cancer in our body. Only in very, very, very few errors, maybe one in a billion such error, does a cancer cell arise, but even then our body has a lot of mechanisms to fight off this cancer cell, to prevent it from becoming full-blown cancer.

If we didn’t have systems like this in our body, we would all be getting skin cancer just by being exposed to sunlight. Radiations that can cause ionization and can thus break bonds are called ionizing radiations. And these have very high frequencies starting from the upper limit of the UV rays, then x-rays and then gamma rays.

sunlight can cause skin cancers:

UV light from sunlight can cause skin cancers. Repeated exposure to x-rays can cause various different kinds of cancers and this is why you see x-ray technicians wearing lead coats like this. And gamma rays released from nuclear explosions like Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear disasters like Chernobyl can cause lots of different cancers and can even kill instantly.

Light frequencies below that of the top UV light spectrum and then infrared rays, microwaves, 4G, 5G and radio frequencies are called non-ionizing radiation. And they’re called non-ionizing radiations because they don’t have enough energy to knock off an electron from the outermost orbit. So they can’t ionize molecules in your body and cannot break bonds in your DNA and thus not cause cancer. So 5G can’t cause cancer basically.

Is 5G completely safe?

But does that mean 5G is completely safe and what are health effects of 5G? It may not be. There’s a controversial and yet unproven syndrome caused by electromagnetic wave exposure called electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Which has symptoms ranging from headaches to mood swings, to even depression.

Although there is currently no scientific evidence to this, it may only be psychogenic, but we may discover in five to 10 years that this actually happens, especially in the context of 5G because 5G is a higher frequency and therefore shorter wavelength, it cannot travel far. It cannot pass through obstacles like trees, walls, and buildings and can even be disturbed by rainwater.

So unlike 3G and 4G, we can’t have a big central transmitter. We need to have multiple small transmitters spread across the city, maybe one in every block or two blocks. So this means technically that we’ll have more radiation exposure from 5G than we did from 4G or 3G. That’s a bummer, but do we need to be worried? Not really.

Are Electromagnetic Waves Harmful?

ICNIRP. Wow, that’s a mouthful. It’s an organization that is independent and not controlled by any governments or any corporate companies. It monitors the health effect of electromagnetic waves and it has cleared up to 300 gigahertz, that is the top frequency of 5G waves as safe. And there are very strict regulations as to how much energy these waves can carry.

So all of the studies done till now say 5G is safe and once 5G becomes more mainstream, it’ll be studied more extensively. And if there are any health effects, it will be scrapped. So bottom line, you don’t need to worry about the health effects of 5G and no, 5G can’t give you the coronavirus virus. 5G is a wave, the virus is, well, it’s a virus. And 5G can’t be used to control your brains. Our brains don’t work that way.