This is from an email I received from by Arthur Firstenberg [cellphonetaskforce.org]
Early on October 6, 2020at 5:29 a.m. Mountain Time, SpaceX launched another 60 satellites, to join their fellows racing through the ionized layer of air that protects us and gives us life. At about that time, a good friend of mine here in Santa Fe was awakened by a severe nosebleed. That evening, I told the grocery clerk at the checkout counter that I was feeling unusually tired. “So am I,” he said. There are now 738 satellites operating in the Starlink constellation. Except for what they can do for us –connect us faster and faster with billions of people and machines –everyone pretends that they are not there, that we can continue to punch holes in the air with impunity, burn prodigious amounts of fossil fuels, fill up the stratosphere with black soot, litter the night sky with moving lights, and alter the invisible electric field that connects us with the sun and stars and circulates through our bodies from birth until death. In recent weeks, on the coast of Australia, record numbers of whales committed suicide by beaching themselves. In Botswana, hundreds of elephants suddenly collapsed and died. Here in the southwest, from Nebraska, to Colorado, to Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, to northern Mexico, millions of migrating birds have fallen dead out of the sky, emaciated, starved to death because there are no insects to eat.
Our house is burning down and no firefighters come. The source of the flames is unacknowledged, unseen. It is there, in the air, speeding from phone to phone, antenna to antenna, satellite to satellite, filling atmosphere, earth, and seas, penetrating bones and disrupting nerves of every animal, bird, insect, and tree. And it is not because we are horrible people. It is not because of a conspiracy to destroy the world. It is because the phones in our hands demand it. On April 11, 1862, Henry Brooks Adams, grandson of the sixth American president, wrote, “I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. That day is here. It is up to us to put out the fire, not just to protest and march and blame other people. We cannot stop the earth from burning down until we stop shooting flames from our fingers wherever we go. It is the people without cell phones who are going to lead the new environmental movement, to lead the way to a sustainable future. Other technologies pollute inadvertently. Pesticides are intended to kill pests; the fact that they escape into the general environment is unintentional. Nuclear waste is not intended to go everywhere. Plastics are not intended to end up in the ocean. But with cell phones, the pollutant –radiation –is the product. Cell phones cannot work unless every square inch of the environment is irradiated. Once this becomes acceptable, nature is no longer of value. This newsletter will be devoted to two of the engines of science that are beyond our strength to control, that have the existence of the world in their power: cell phones and plastics –unless we wake up and stop using them.
IT’S NOT LIKE WE DIDN’T KNOW
If Neil Armstrong had brought a cell phone to the moon in 1969, it would have appeared from earth, at night, to be the brightest object in the universe in the microwave spectrum. In the daytime, the sun would have been brighter, but at night, the cell phone would have outshone every star3. There is a reason cell phones are outlawed in Green Bank, West Virginia, home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory: even a single cell phone, even from miles away, would blind the radio astronomers there and make it impossible for them to see the stars. Astronomers measure radio waves in units called janskys. A typical star shines at 10 to 100 janskys. The Sun shines at about 500,000 janskys. When you hold a cell phone against your head, you are pumping energy at the rate of about 100,000,000,000,000,000 janskys into your brain1. If we are going to save this planet, we have to be able to think and reason. And we have known since 1975 that microwave radiation damages the brain. In that year, Allan Frey published his ground-breaking article, “Neural function and behavior: defining the relationship2. In a study on rats, he found that low-level microwaves – one hundred times lower than what people’s brains are exposed to from their cell phones today–damage the blood-brain barrier. This is the anatomical barrier that keeps toxic chemicals, bacteria and viruses in your blood from entering your brain. It is also the barrier that maintains the inside of your head at a constant pressure and prevents you from having a stroke. At least twenty laboratoriesin many countries confirmed Frey’s work over the years. Finally, in 2003, neurosurgeon Leif Salford, at Lund University in Sweden, proved the obvious: that disrupting the blood-brain barrier causes brain damage. He exposed rats to a cell phone, once for two hours, at very low power, and sacrificed them fifty days later. Two percent of the exposed rats’ brain cells were damaged or destroyed3. He later exposed rats to a cell phone, again at very low power, for two hours once a week for a year, and found that they were cognitively impaired4. And in 2020, a study has been published showing that the same thing happens in humans. A team of scientists at Heidelberg University in Germany used MRIs to examine the brains of 48 young adults between the ages of 18 and 30. They found that the more hours per day their subjects habitually spent on their smartphones, the less gray matter they had in their brains and the less brain activity was detected5.
References:
[1]1 jansky = 10-26W/m2/Hz. The values given are for cell phone frequencies.
[2] Frey AH et al. 1975. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences247:433-9.7
[3] Salford L et al. 2003. “Nerve cell damage in mammalian brain after exposure to microwaves from GSM mobile phones.”Environmental Health Perspectives111(7):881-3.
[4] Nittby H et al. 2008. “Cognitive impairment in rats after long-term exposure to GSM-900 mobile phone radiation. Bioelectromagnetics29:219-32.
[5] HorvathJ et al. 2020. Structural and functional correlates of smartphone addiction. Addictive Behaviors105:106334
