Electromagnetism, sonar, radar, Wi-Fi 1-5G, ultrasound, phone radiation, microwave radiation. What’s it all doing to me — or my kids?
You’ll have occasion to wonder: Is the technological environment messing with me? Terraforming my natural conditions of existence?
Every report is received with the same blinders.
Is it also making other people dumb, depressed, mean?
No one you see (most days) is actively sprouting new appendages where appendages should not be. Nothing so obvious. And while even the most somnambulant among us harbor suspicions that some sort of effects must accompany such rapid and overwhelming change as has been brought about over the last, say, 40 years, we aren’t on the whole prepared to give up Amazon next-day, streaming movies on-demand, or the hope of luxury on cosmic scales: space travel, life extension, weeks or months spent in video-sensorial orgasmo-ecstasy.
Still, if something goes up, it eventually goes down … right?
Queries into effects are usually enough to placate. “Studies show …” and “effects on rats don’t equate to effects on humans” and similar palliative or obscurant phraseology is most often “reason” enough to let us rest, trust it will be OK, and — let’s face it — get back to our jobs, which allow our existence in the system at all.
Here’s the problem with this palliative and avoidant (if sometimes necessary) circuit that puts wonder to rest. Researchers aren’t studying, at all, the effects of the invisible forces and entities swarming through us all day, every day. Not the combined effects, nor the cumulative effects, nor the interactive effects.
That’s a lot of whistling past the graveyard.
And we’re building out that graveyard at a breakneck pace.
It’s all connected
There have been some studies, of course. Ten years ago, University of Bristol researchers concluded that “anthropogenic (man-made) noise is a global pollutant, and there is rapidly accumulating evidence of impacts on a range of animal taxa.”
The most outstanding aspect of this study is how it shows that a slight alteration in one physical sense impacts another, separate sense. “Using field-based experimental trials on habituated wild dwarf mongooses,” the team reported, “we combine sound playbacks and faecal presentations to demonstrate that anthropogenic noise can disrupt responses to information from different sensory modalities.”
Auditory stimulus didn’t just affect hearing, but smell. “Our results,” the researchers concluded, “are the first to show that anthropogenic noise could alter responses to olfactory cues, strongly indicating the possibility of cross-modal impacts of noise pollution on information use.”
Ten years, later, where’s the mountain of follow-up studies doing what “the science” is supposed to do — systematically explore and clarify areas of life where there seem to be nettlesome problems, the solution to which might just make life better, more livable, for everyone?
No. The unpredictable ways that combined human alterations alter the environment are not studied. There’s no incentive. And there are many incentives to shut up, shy away, deflect, and deny. Every result is reported with blinders on. Every report is received with the same blinders.
Safety, efficacy, and effects on biological environment are willfully lost in the shuffle. If a corporation footing the bill for innovative tech X is incentivized by threat Y, whether coming from government pressure, insurance costs, or future damage, then an otherwise relevant study is constructed to leap those threat hurdles and quickly shuffle back offstage.
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What’s more, the various research fields are tightly siloed, so it gets ever harder for troublesome inquirers to connect the dots from evidentiary data scattered across disciplines.
Tracking the clues
And yet, there’s still a train of breadcrumbs for those skilled and patient enough to do some tracking.
Consider, for instance, that GDP correlates to overall ocean acoustic noise. It’s up 10-fold from baseline. The more stuff we pump out, the louder the oceans get. There’s no inherent upper bound.
Similarly, the air around us is filling up with artificial energy. Planetary ambient radio frequency power flux density — that’s how much RF energy is present in the environment — in the frequency range around 1 GHz has increased by a factor of roughly 10^18 compared to what existed naturally before humans built transmitters. That figure, for the less math-inclined, is one quintillion. If that figure is 90% exaggerated, that’s still one hundred quadrillion times more EMF-saturated than we were in a natural, pre-hypertech world.
Then, there’s artificial light. Eighty percent of the world’s population, and over 99% of U.S. and European populations, now live under light-polluted skies. The Milky Way is hidden from more than a third of humanity. Reliable estimates show light pollution increased about 8% per year between 2011 and 2022.
The point of these bread crumbs is simple: The research, such as it exists at all, always gets pigeonholed away, so the overall, combined impact of the manmade alterations to our living space can never been seen in its totality for what it really is. People ruefully joke that the government’s debt is so big that we can’t even conceive of its actual size. This is bigger. What we’ve amassed in terms of sound waves and frequencies is so enormous that it simply defies lexical categorization or comparison.
I’m sure it’s fine. We’ve positioned our best, brightest, and most moral as leaders.
Lies of omission
We seem to have overlooked what the ancients knew of themselves — that we live under limits emplaced by an omniscient and omnipotent higher power. The pathetic part, as so much of our given humanity is traded away for nothing of lasting value? If we were to actually stop and check in on success rates around life extension and ostensible cures, we’d see that our return on investment has so far been minimal. We’d realize we everyday people have spent our whole lives bombarded by the noise of sensational claims, devious scams, and schemes designed to deconstruct our common sense until we finally cave in.
Scientific “salvation” is always, of course, just around the corner — if not today, then surely tomorrow. Meanwhile, as the poor dwarf mongoose shows, we turn a blind eye to the truth. Stubbornly, we refuse even to look at, much less reckon with, the costs and consequences of the complexity we’ve introduced. Honesty with ourselves, in this economy? We’re just following incentives, fatalistically accepting whatever our circumstances might be. When the worth of a human lifespan is measured in fast-depreciating dollars, what do you expect?
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