this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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I feel like the limit itself COULD be reasonable (there's more to the potential harms than ionizing radiation /cancer), but popscience news sites are going to make misleading headlines anyways
Can you provide me with articles about that? Afaik the general scientific consensus is that as long as it's not shoving out >100watts or is releasing EM radiation on an ionizing band (UV and higher), then it's pretty harmless.
Can you warm up a chicken with wifi? Yeah, but afaik a signal that strong would probably already violate various international treaties regarding radio communications long before it got strong enough to have a noticable affect on the chicken.
Think about how many watts your microwave needs to cook food. That's the amount of power it takes to heat up food using EM radiation that's been roughly tuned with the intention of penetrating and heating physical matter by generating friction between water molecules. If I understand the article, the iPhone is putting out less than 6 watts. That's almost nothing. Should there be a limit? Yeah, but to my knowledge, you'd start accidentally jamming communication frequencies around you long before it became a threat to personal health.
Ah ok that makes sense, that's what I was wondering in another thread. If a phone COULD output a dangerous level of EMR.
I was referring to the stuff you described, just didn't know the specifics. Edited my comment to stress that
It's perhaps helpful to realize that the difference between visible light and radio isn't really that much, they're both on the EM spectrum. You can generally think about non-ionizing EM radiation like you would light and not be too far off in terms of intuition on danger. How dangerous would you consider a 5W lightbulb? 60W? 100W? 500W? You probably wouldn't want to press your face up to a 60W bulb, but you wouldn't worry about having one sitting in your ceiling, or even a couple feet away from you. For reference FCC rules limit wifi access points to under 5W of power in most cases (there's exceptions for point-to-point radios, but those are VERY uncommon except in some specific commercial settings). Likewise a phone sitting in your pocket, or even held up to your face that's putting out even 10W while over double the power limit really isn't anything to worry about.
The current limits for RF devices are VERY conservative, in part due to the massive fear mongering caused by article titles like the above one. The limits are set in such a way that there is absolutely no risk whatsoever, even for devices that massively exceed the limits. In fact I'd argue the limits have far more to do with interference than any actual health concerns. Nobody wants to have to battle their neighbors for wifi signal and a big way to accomplish that is to mandate very low power limits. Many lower power devices are far easier to manage in terms of interference than a few high power devices.