That last one has been the least active. Rich people have always been able to afford organic food and to count on poor kids getting enough vaccines to create herd immunity for their special snowflakes, but cell phones are more challenging because they are individual - and getting a new iPhone was a status symbol. Due to their omnipresence, signals are everywhere, just like TV and radio and cosmic rays before them, so most elites give up and recognize that unless Jimmy Choo makes a hat lined with tinfoil, they are stuck.
Activists worry 5G will cause cancer but if that was possible, where are all the bodies? Surely the 'radiation' from this DynaTAC 8000X would have caused a giant spike. Nope. Credit: Motorola.
Yet 5G cell phones - higher frequency, more data - seem to be too much for them and they have gone way beyond 'buy you don't know, do you?' undermining of science and into full Karen Mode. Organic industry trade groups like Organic Consumers Association and their vassal site US Right To Know believe food is reckless scientists 'tinkering' with nature, and that is how SARS-CoV-2 came to pass as well. Now they have added in 5G cell phone hysteria and are telling people to bring city council meetings to a halt demanding that 5G towers not be built near schools.
Science says they have to be built in lots of places because the frequency, and data rate, will be high. For some applications, the military uses extremely low frequency (ELF) radio waves which means a gigantic antenna. To bypass an electromagnetic pulse in a nuclear attack they even proposed an antenna that was equivalent in size to 40 percent of Wisconsin - a parabolic antenna 6,000 miles long. People don't want to send Morse Code, though, they want to watch YouTube videos. That means high bandwidth and shorter distances. There are no legitimate concerns but having transmitters and repeaters 'closer' is the most common concern.
We're never going to educate everyone. While there are sincere skeptics out there, most can never answer the 'what would change your mind? question so they invent something new and fantastic to be concerned about. They then move the goalposts, always needing 'more study' and embracing alternatives. Solar power marketing leveraged this well. It's how they got environmentalists to turn on natural gas and hydroelectric power, both of which had been evangelized by activist groups for decades.
Yet 5G worry seems exceptionally hollow, so fringe even 'the Large Hardon Collider could create a black hole on earth' contingent think it's not based on science. Cell phones are non-ionizing radiation - unlike the natural cosmic rays we are bombarded with each day - and their "radiation" is the same as a lightbulb. How many light bulbs are on while you read this. Your tablet, phone, or computer monitor is emitting the same "radiation", except more of it than these base stations they claim to worry about.
What do Russia Today, this lawyer, and a whole lot of vaccine- and agricultural-science deniers share in common? They all want to keep America eating itself alive, and worrying about 5G is one effort to achieve that.
A new study wants to light a candle rather than curse their darkness. It says that instead of protesting 5G wireless towers at City Council meetings, they could advocate for tethered antennae in the sky. Instead of being on all of the time, these tethered aerial vehicles could move on demand and power up or power down. This is obviously a perceptual solution. "Radiation" exposure from the phones themselves is far higher than from towers, but if activists knew science, they'd spend as much time protesting the impact of 5G on their brains as they do the effect a fly flapping its wings has on the moon. If these roving aerial towers make people feel better than network base stations, and the free market agrees, so be it.
Yet like that 6,000 miles of antenna in Wisconsin or successful communism, this feels like a truly academic solution. It will never happen in the real world. Environmentalists who dislike cell phone towers will not sue over drones cluttering the skies? They block large solar installations and desalinization plants, lawsuits are how they keep their lawyers employed.
The selling point would first have to be calling them "green" antennas - because they only receive signals but still have higher data transfer speeds. That is a marketing issue. The science issue is this could work, even if it solves a problem no one really has. Organic food became a $120 billion industry that way.
The group have applied for a provisional U.S. patent on the concept and the computer control algorithm.
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