Comment by 🚀 stack
I am an honorary electrical engineer with a bit of RF experience. I know too many people with acoustic neuromas.
I like falling asleep to audiobooks, and keep my phone nearby. I most definitely sleep better when I set it to airplane mode. Wired soft headphones of course; I would never put a microwave transmitter inside my skull.
I've considered making a Faraday cage 4-poster bed with conductive mesh fabric, but it is really hard to do it right.
The best sleep of my life was at Wilson's Prom in Australia, no phone service and wombats running around at night.
Oh, and while I am not at all convinced that microwave radiation gives you cancer, my pet theory is that it makes you stupid by very slowly cooking your brain. A microwave oven cooks meat at a couple of hundred watts on low; a phone shoves maybe two watts into your skull.
Give it a few decades and see how smart you are then.
2025-08-21 · 9 months ago
4 Later Comments ↓
👻 darkghost [OP] · 2025-08-21 at 09:08:
Most microwave ovens don't have a "low" power setting and instead use a duty cycle that switches 1,000 watts of power off and on. Newer inductive microwave ovens can actually lower power output but it is still hundreds of watts. WiFi transmitters operate at peak 0.1 watts per ETSI standards. 10^5 difference there. To visualize: picture a gallon of milk vs a swimming pool of milk. That is the magnitude.
Meanwhile stupidity predates synthetic microwave radiation by a considerable amount, having been discovered by the ancients sometime around the invention of spoken language.
In conclusion: There is a far greater risk of stupid coming from the content of those microwaves entering your device rather than your head.
🚀 stack · 2025-08-21 at 12:10:
I think the biggest misunderstanding has to do with the energy reduction at the square of distance, making pretty much anything not immediately touching you or being inside your head not an issue.
Phones and WiFi routers however will put out up to 2 watts of RF. Multiply by daily usage times a few decades, with a few hundred unknown factors
Your scull forms a resonant cavity and I don't like the idea of using it to bounce microwaves, even though blutooth is pretty low-power. Resonant cavities form standing waves, and all bets are off.
👻 darkghost [OP] · 2025-08-21 at 15:27:
I will just have to refer to the philosopher Albert Yankovic, who in his essay titled "Dare to be Stupid" suggests one "stick your head in the microwave and get yourself a tan" among other pieces of advise.
In all seriousness, in neuroscience research laboratory animals are sacrificed by high power microwaves precisely for the reason that it preserves metabolic and anatomic integrity of the brain and its tissues better than any other form of killing.
🚀 stack · 2025-08-21 at 15:52:
That is interesting! I would think that high-power microwaves would boil water and disrupt tissues.
Not likely to give you tan though.
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