Quote from: a on November 20, 2021, 20:06:44
The frequency of natural light is 5 orders of magnitude higher than 5GHz wifi (from 480 trillion Hz upwards). If you think wifi is harmful to you, how do you not melt in sunlight?
That's not how it works. It's not as simple as higher frequency = more harmful. Visible light is high enough frequency and low enough energy that it's easily blocked by pretty much everything (clothes, skin, even paper). Higher frequencies have more penetration and/or do damage because they have more energy and because their extremely short wavelength allows them to essentially worm their way through, winding their way around the atoms. Microwaves are harmful for the same reason, only inverse: their longer wavelengths allow them to slip through the atoms as well. Visible light just happens to be in the middle where its wavelength isn't short or long enough.
Picture a grid of tightly-spaced dots. A low-frequency sine wave could slalom its way through, like a car around cones, perhaps crossing between dots every one or two it passes, and a high-frequency one could do the same, but switching direction once or more per dot. Meanwhile, a sine wave with a mid-range frequency would just crash into the dots, like a car slaloming through cones at the wrong rate.
There's a reason radars, which operate in the microwave frequency, must be disabled when there's a chance of a person being exposed to them: because they're dangerous. Same goes for microwave ovens being designed as a Faraday cage (the screen in the door is sized to cause the microwaves to not be able to penetrate, like positioning the dots above just right so a specific wavelength sine wave can't get through), and why you're not supposed to operate it with the door open. Microwaves are very harmful. This isn't in doubt; it's a widely accepted and known fact.
There's also mounting evidence, unsurprisingly, that phones, Wi-Fi, etc are harmful. So there's absolutely cause for concern here. But as usual, the desire for progress and, perhaps more importantly, profit, overrides that, and we just push on full-steam ahead throwing caution to the wind, because all the companies care about is getting more bandwidth to increase consumption and get users to spend more time and money on their products and, of course, keeping up with the competition, because if they don't do it, others will.