I talked to Cormac Halpin, chief statistician with the CSO about the upcoming census.

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Let’s do a bit of science.

Maybe, like me, you have had various social
media invaded by people making all sorts of complaints about something called
5G. That’s the newest mobile data standard. Unless you are really special, that
doesn’t work on your phone yet, but the networks are being installed, and newer
handsets using them will be available soon, probably starting at the top end of
the price range.

5G just means the fifth generation, the
first was basic mobile phones, the second was text messaging, 4G allows
internet, and 5G will allow you to control the space shuttle, or something. If
you click too far into Facebook or YouTube, you’d be forgiven for thinking that
an apocalypse was planned, something between the worst nightmares of the
antivaxxers and those people who say that their thoughts are controlled by the
CIA via a chip in their brain. So I really just want to give the basic
scientific information here.

5G is data transmitted over radio waves.
Just like any other form of data transmitted through the air, mobile phone
voice or data signals, FM radio, broadcast TV or your home wifi. All of them
are, technically, radiation. So is light – by which I mean the light that your
eyes use to see things around you, and so are magnetic waves, the ones that
spin the needle on a compass.

Some conspiracy theorists have been saying
vague things that imply that 5G uses some weird special type of radiation that
is dangerous or untested. In reality, 5G uses frequencies that are already in
use by home wifi systems and digital TV broadcasts. Sure, the content of that
signal is new technology, but the content of the signal has no relevance to the
frequency it’s broadcast on.

So where does that all collide with radiation that we know can kill us? Basically, the electromagnetic spectrum is split in two halves – ionizing radiation and non-ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiation is too weak to strip the electrons off atoms, so it doesn’t create ions. Ionizing radiation is the dangerous stuff. It can knock electrons off atoms and break molecules, like your DNA, which can trigger cancer.

All radiation fits on a spectrum, the