The common wisdom would say it heats up but that's not guaranteed.
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However, remember that radio signals lose energy to free space proportional to the (distance and frequency) _squared_ [1]. A 60GHz signal is attenuated by 88dB at 10 meters. That means that if it is transmitted with 100 W (20dBW), the RF power that arrives at your position is -68dBW, or 0.000158 milliwatts. That isn't going to heat up much.
It's still small, but the best simple approximation is just to take the 100W and divide by the proportion of the antenna pattern your target occupies.
A 100W source on 2GHz or 60GHz at 10 meters distance is going to dump about the same amount of energy into you. If the transmit antenna has 3dB of gain, that's going to be about 50mW.
But people do not get smaller as the frequency increases: they occupy the same fraction of the 10m radius sphere around the antenna.
This sounds far-fetched, and it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see it done in a lab, like some of the other practically infeasible but bleeding edge cool hacks.
No, that's impossible. The RF power imparted onto the EM field by any antenna array is equal to or less than the sum of the output power of each antennae.
It's why 60GHz is license free and used for WiGig, wireless HDMI and short haul microwave links like the ones from Mikrotik.
The heavy oxygen attenuation makes it commercially worthless.
Same reason why there's a license free band on 24GHz too. 24GHz suffers from water vapor absorption and has heavier attenuation than adjecent bands thanks to that. For example Ubiquiti AirFiber uses license free 24GHz.
I appreciate and read the honest and detailed technical takes on the topic here.
Especially acknowledging uncertainty and a healthy amount of doubt are pretty essential to the epistemological pursuit. And fear may arise when the uncertainty and doubt are not dispelled with reason.
If it does something other than turn into heat the laws of thermodynamics are wrong which is somewhat unlikely.
Tumor Treating Fields are an FDA-approved mechanism for treating certain cancers (mostly gliomas). The exact mechanism isn’t understood, but it seems that prolonged exposure to low power alternating electrical fields in the 100-500kHz region interferes with cell mitosis [1]. I haven’t read about it recently but at the time the speculation was that it was basically disrupting microtubule formation by physically agitating polar molecules involved with the process.
The application from Optune and others uses contact electrodes to drive a small potential gradient though the skull and into the brain.
We know radio frequency also affects polar molecules, mostly to heat up meals. Obviously at multi-GHz carrier frequencies we wouldn’t expect to see this behaivor emerge. However, most digital protocols don’t operate with continuous carriers..the break comms into frames and do things like frequency hopping at much lower periodicity than the carrier. If there was something dumping energy into the cytoplasm on a 2-10 microsecond interval, it could have similar effects.
Do i think 5g is going to cure brain cancer? Probably not, but the body is ridiculously complex and can be surprising. I think we just have to find a way to be able to talk about these concerns fruitfully rather than just try to squash them, because that’s generally where the trouble seems to start.
And I am not just trying to latch onto the first unknown that's brought up under my comment, these are very similar to the concerns that I had in mind and wanted to bring up.
At the wavelengths we would now be dealing with and exposing ourselves to, there may be - and with some evidence already pointing there probably being surprising and not immediately intuitive (mostly) biological interactions or disruptions to interactions our biology relies on that we are yet unaware or haven't understood leading to phenomenons we haven't considered such as the example you've given.
Re: 5g we have so much accumulated knowledge and experience dealing with RF that the likelihood that we're going to be caught completely offguard and have no reasonable mitigation seems pretty low. At the same time, it's pretty obvious that our biology didn't have an opportunity to adapt to the types of energy we're putting into the environment and we'd be well served to keep an open mind about what the possible effects could be and how we would test and/or monitor for them.
There are other contemporary topics that suffer this same pathology. Reasonable questions raised in good faith get slapped down regularly and I think we pay a collective price for it. Of course some questions aren't reasonable and certainly not all are raised in good faith, so it's not exactly an easy problem to solve.
Interesting paper on using EM simulations on finely detailed insect models to determine net energy absorption and associated properties: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22271-3
Endless patience for off the wall ideas isn't a sustainable option either, so I'm not claiming to have all the answers, I just wish we were maybe a step or two in that direction.
> what's happening to that energy? The common wisdom would say it heats up but that's not guaranteed.
As the first and second laws of thermodynamics are well understood and tested theoretical principals that have been experimentally and theoretically verified for ~170 years, there is far more than "the common wisdom" backing the expectation that the system would heat up.
A common conversational tactic to lead the conversation into conspiracy territory is to cast unsubstantiated doubt on a settled topic - then frame the orthodox view as something pushed by an "establishment". A far more interesting discussion emerges when data is presented, or absent data a plausible mechanism for harm.
There is nothing wrong with studying the biological effects of EM fields. We certainly know that small quantities of Benzene, or Arsenic have large impacts on biological organisms - and that biological organisms react to certain portions of the EM spectrum in complex manners e.g. Visible light, and infrared. However we do have some good bounds on how much impact there can be and where it is likely to emerge based on ~120 years of radio spectrum deployments.