Compare that to visible light, which is the same thing, EM radiation, but because of the way higher frequency has 100.000 times higher energy density per Watt emitted.

In general, there are only two way EM radiation can cause harm: Number one is ionizing radiation. That is, a photon contains so much energy that it can, upon hitting an electron e.g. in your skin, hurling it out to become a free radical. For radiation to be ionizing, it has to have much higher energy per photon than the 5G frequencies. Radiation starts to become ionizing at wavelengsth of about 300nm (i.e. UV light).

The only other known way is through overheating tissue until it becomes damaged. As these frequencies are absorbed by water, which is part of practically every cell, this already happens in the skin - and if your skin warms up into damaging territory, you would definitely feel that.

Just keep it in perspective, you walk around outside under a nuclear fusion fireball receiving around 1000 watts of terahertz radiation some of it ionizing and known to cause cancer.

Wifi, Cell including 5G are in the Gigahertz range, non-ionizing, which means they can basically heat your flesh like a microwave and nothing more and are at milliwatt power levels from the phones transmitter and maybe a hundred watts from the towers transmitter.

This would be like worrying about what an led flashlight (the phone) or street light (the cell station) does to you.

You would need a lot more power, or an antenna pattern much more focused, and for it to be continuously emitting for a long time while very close to your skin to actually get hot enough to cause burns or denature proteins (which is about the only thing non-ionising radiation can do).

But phones don’t transmit all the time, but in bursts, and the antenna pattern spreads the radiation out.

Our company builds satellite antennas that focus 25-100W of RF power (in various bands from L band at 1-2GHz up to Ka at 29-31GHz) into about a 1 degree or so beam (big parabolic dish reflector), and at that point you need to take some precautions. I don’t have a single worry about phones.

My understanding is that Wi-Fi, cellular (no matter the 12345G) and radio signals are all harmless in 99.99999% circumstances as they are non-ionizing radiation. They are no more harmful to you than light photons.

In fact, Wi-Fi signals might be safer than light. Since you don't have eyes sensitive to the EM wavelength of Wi-Fi, you can't shine a 'wifi light' too brightly next to you.

Damaging radiation as we think of it is most often in the form of ionizing radiation such as too much sunlight, microwaves that excite water molecules, or high amounts of alpha / beta / gamma particles that can mess with DNA etc. and thus cause cancer as DNA damage accumulates.

5+ Ghz frequencies are often used in precision radar and I worked with people who worked on them in the Navy. A few had stories of getting "zapped" by them if they were left on against safety guidelines. The feeling is like having popcorn pop under your skin because the waves are quickly absorbed by the water in the dead layer of your skin. No one in the entirety of military radar had ever got cancer from one of these radars but sometimes they get a fun wake up call to get back down the radar mast to slap whoever left the dish spinning.

There is NO mechanism you're actually providing because you are saying molecules can be "damaged" without actually describing what that even means. DNA is ionic bonds only so enlighten me how they are ever "damaged" because we're aren't in the territory of covenant or hydrogen bonds that can be affected by stuff like heat.

You can KILL cells with high frequency RF but cancer doesn't come about when a cell dies but when the DNA is DAMAGED through and IONIZING event.

"they can't prove its safe... unless they test the entire set of frequencies used in future phone models too"

Your premise is bad. We can't prove anything is 100% safe ever. We instead try to assess risk which is probability of the adverse event multiplied by its impact and reduced by mitigations if available.

And we've done that TIME AND TIME AGAIN for the tin-foil-hat crowd that doesn't understand basic physics:

"Overall, the epidemiological studies on RF EMF exposure do not show an increased risk of brain tumours. Furthermore, they do not indicate an increased risk for other cancers of the head and neck region."

http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/emerging/do...

Please at least Google for the research before declaring it doesn't exist. You're using the same logic as anti-vax/anti-gmo/anti-science in general; just declare no/not enough research had been done and gish gallop arguments to promote fear, uncertainty and doubt when in reality scientists HAVE been at work making sure the risks are low and you're just denying their efforts.

Non-ionizing radiation such as microwaves produces heating effects. At low power you may perceive warming and nothing else, at high power you'll surely be burned.

Heating from microwaves can be more damaging than say heat from a stove because the longer wavelength means heating starts from one's insides and will cause considerable tissue/organ damage before one realizes what's happening.

Microwave ovens can be very dangerous if the door interlocks are bypassed and the door opened whilst it's operating. People who are seen on YouTube doing this are either ignorant of the dangers or are just plain crazy!

Microwaves, especially shorter wavelengths above 5GHz (that's about 5 times that of mobile phones) are especially damaging to the eyes as interior of the eye doesn't have a good way of dissipating heat.

I was taught never to look into waveguides even when only used with receiving equipment as even the local oscillator can have enough power to damage one's eyes if concentrated in a small area. About 1W/cm^2 has a noticeable heating effect and from about 5GHz (approx 6cm wavelength) the CSA of waveguides is small enough to concentrate EM radiation of, say, 1W to do damage to one's eyes.

For mobile phones scale that figure down as the longer wavelength dissipates the power over a greater area (also remember area goes up by the square of the wavelength which means that phone wavelengths are much less damaging than microwave frequencies (>3GHz).

I'm not up to date on the latest research but from what I was taught I'd be concerned if more than 0.1W/cm^2 were entering my eyeball. In fact, if I recall the Russian standard for exposure was 0.1W/cm^2 which was considerably tighter than the US figure of 1W/cm^2.

Keep in mind those figures were for the microwave band which starts at 3GHz. As mentioned, because of the longer wavelength of mobile phones it's unlikely one could exceed those figures whilst using a mobile.

Molecular chemistry where e.g. protein clusters copy DNA, is very intricate, and introducing electromagnetic resonances in such processes could be potentially disruptive. It's not just your receiver that picks up energy from radio waves, molecules can too (even without losing electrons).

In fact, someone cannot prove mobile phones are safe once and for all unless they tested the entire set of frequencies used in future phone models too.

This is a very bold claim. People said something just as harmless about x-rays in its heyday, too. Today we know it has absolutely profound effects on living cells even at moderate power, and we know it indeed also has an effect of the negative kind at low power given proper time and exposure. How can you be so sure that the GHz spectrum of EMR happen to be as harmless as you imply?

It turns out that non-ionizing radiation can actually affect cells and DNA.

I personally know a couple people who went blind from looking at radio sources (one was a wave-guide the other was a radar dish; oops). That's one reason I never watch my food cook in a microwave.

As a kid we used to cook hotdogs using an antenna and transmitter.

So yeah, radio waves can have an effect on you no doubt. As for cancer, well, anything that damages your cells theoretically has a chance at cancer. Whether that risk is higher than normal with common radio sources like cellphones is up for debate but I think it's possible.

Edit: Most Wifi is very weak so at even a small distance unlikely to damage cells. Cellphones can be more powerful and you hold it right up against your body. Does it actually damage cells? I think the jury is still out but again I think it's possible..

Whether we're talking about radiation caused by wireless communication (e.g. wifi at 2.4/5 GHz) or high-frequency oscillations in a microprocessor, it's pretty safe to say that all of the significant electromagnetic radiation coming off of a wearable computer is under 10 GHz.

Damage to proteins, DNA, etc. due to radiation is either caused by that radiation stripping electrons / breaking covalent bonds, or through heating.

The sort of electromagnetic radiation that strips electrons and breaks covalent bonds is called ionizing radiation; ionizing radiation only occurs above a certain frequency threshold (depending on the material being ionized). This fact is, in fact, the reason Einstein got his Nobel in physics. Anyway, its pretty safe to say that, say, red visible light (400 THz) does not ionize important human molecules. Ultraviolet is usually considered to be the low end of the ionizing radiation range.

Therefore, because 400 THz > 10 GHz, radiation coming from wearable computers could not possibly cause molecular damage to humans through ionization. The light coming from the screen is significantly more dangerous in this respect than anything coming from the other electronics.

How about heating? Consider that a typical wearable computing device only consumes a few watts. If this power were distributed diffusely, it is harmless, and if it were focused, it would cause obvious and painful burns, which we know doesn't happen.

It's important to note that the energy per packet rather than the number of packets that matters. It's similar to how I could fire a thousand ping-pong balls at you and you'd be fine, but one bullet would be a completely different story.

X-Rays are very short wavelength and have a relatively high probability of ionizing atoms in your body. UV light is longer in wavelength, but is still just barely ionizing. The lights in your home are probably pretty safe. WiFi is substantially longer wavelength (and lower energy per packet) than visible light, so it's even less likely to give you cancer.

Put simply, if you're worried about getting cancer from ionizing radiation you should go live in the dark in a cave as far underground as you can get before worrying about what's coming out of your cell-phone or router.

And they'd cause a... slight heating effect. That's about it. So yeah, if you held your voice transmitting phone directly to your face for several decades, you might create enough tissue damage to up the cancer risk.

But then the radio engineers I used to work with climbed radio towers with microwave emitters putting out far far far more energy than a cellphone, and their only rule was "don't stick your head or crotch in front of a microwave transmitter as you're climbing up".

5G is also a horribly imprecise term - it can include anything from 600 MHz UHF to 40 GHz mm wave, and widely varying modulation and power control schemes. The lower bands are probably not a problem, as we've been using some of them for quite a while, though not on our persons. The mm-wave and THz stuff really is a huge unknown.

One problem is that these technologies don't ever get seriously tested for biological effects: They just get deployed due to industry/govt/carrier/market pressure, and by the time we have enough data to even know therer might be a danger (viz, the GSM study above), we're already experimenting on the population as test subjects for the next generation of risk. At least as much as the frequency, the modulation method seems to matter, too, with the very sharp-edged full-power square waves of TSM/GSM type signals probably being considerably worse than the noise-like CDMA, for instance. (IMO, there is probably no current (4G/5G) LTE technology that is nearly as safe as CDMA.) More recent research does seem to show that there are RF health effects that are NOT related to heating, but heating is the only thing any of the gov't/industry "RF safety" regs cover.

This really is one of those areas where an honest person is forced to recognize that we have no idea what we don't know. RF and biology is a barely studied field, yet we know that many (most? all?) living things do have biophoton systems that we don't understand, and have largely ignored. 5G could be heinously dangerous, or relatively benign. So the answer to your question is no, there isn't (much) solid evidence yet that 5G is dangerous, and we won't really know for many years. But neither is there any actual evidence that it is safe and harmless...

Blocking signals with your body becomes more true as frequency (and bandwidth) goes up. 5G Wifi can't even properly penetrate dry wall, not even mentioning all that water and bone in your body.

Beside that, below the infrared spectrum, it is unlikely that much damage is done by common RF signals; the energy in a quanta from that spectrum is too small to effectively do anything but heat molecules up a tiny bit.

Photochemical effects, ie, things like chemical reactions being induced or cells reacting to the light, require atleast about 1Thz to work (low-end IR).

The heating occurs primarly for frequencies between 30 and 120MHz, which is actively used but not by B2C commercial things, it largely involves ham radio, air traffic radio, sea traffic, weather satellites, etc. Things you're likely to be closer to the receiving end of than the high powered sender.

Which also bring to the other issue; the energies in common RF close to you is too low. If you send with 100mW power, the power your body will capture, even if it's the phone right next to your ear, is likely below 10mW of power. Low enough that your native body heat already overpowers it easily.

Anyone who took high school physics learned about the photoelectric effect - if a single photon does not contain the ionization energy, no ionization occurs [1]. This is supported by a huge number of experiments and is a generic conclusion of quantum mechanics.

The only effect wifi can have on trees, people, etc, is the generation of a tiny amount of heat. If you can disprove this, you will get a Nobel prize in physics.

I wrote a paper on the topic, see the citations for a lot of background material (my paper is just math, don't bother with it): http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/pubs/dipole_delta.pdf

[1] Not true at high intensity, i.e. in a high powered laser beam or microwave resonating cavity.

Your body is constantly bombarded by radio sources both natural and artificial, honestly I wouldn't worry about it.