The Physics of Progress: How Mass Media is Hindering 5G

By Eloisa Marchesoni, who discusses whether there is a Physics of Progress.

Socializing, working, shopping: in recent months we have witnessed an incredible acceleration of technological transformations, which have helped us to create a new everyday life.

It is time to grasp these changes and to put people at the center of the innovations brought by technologies such as AI, Big Data and IoT to realize the vision of a 5.0 world, where 5G makes everything possible.

In this new idea of society, that was born in Japan, the creativity, imagination, and flexibility of the human being are combined with the potential offered by digital transformation to generate value through innovative solutions, capable of anticipating future catastrophic scenario, in order to avoid them or to at least prepare for them beforehand.

The next pandemics may not be a distant future.

To find out how this falls on the world, though, we must first analyze the social fallouts, which are incredibly understandable when assimilated to physics.

“Each mass tends not to vary its state, tends to oppose change; unless it is forced by external forces acting on it …” – this is the definition of inertia, one of the cardinal concepts of classical physics.

But let us reflect on the subject of this statement: “mass”. All of us, whether we like it or not, have a body. We have got a volume, we occupy a space and have a weight.

Now, without being too specific, it is not difficult to say that each of us is, physically, a mass. We are inert by definition. The human being basically tends to oppose changes.

The physics of progress

But still, investigating the macroscopic aspect, nor the word “mass society” neither the name of our sources of information, the mass media, will be new to anyone. We are all together with a single, huge, inert mass.

“The acceleration of an object is […] inversely proportional to its mass,” says Newton’s second law.

It goes without saying, therefore, that to “move” the entire social fabric is necessary a force of an order of magnitude superhuman.

5G, nowadays, represents the novelty, the leap into the void that frightens so many people close to us.
The abbreviation 5G stands for 5th (Fifth) Generation, technology through which it is possible to have far superior performance and speed than the current technology, called 4G / IMT-Advanced.

5G will represent a real revolution in our lifestyle, as the internet will be increasingly within everyone’s reach, very fast, and will mark the rise of necessary technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and the internet of things, which, without a rapid and widespread connection, cannot develop in all their disruptive potential.

Think for example of the difficulties encountered by the networks currently in use when connecting multiple IoT devices at the same time: they will only end up being a complication to our everyday life.

Just to provide an idea of what the gap is, 5G speeds should reach peak values of 20 Gbps. In real practical use, however, the estimates are much lower, around 1.4 Gbps; while the peak of 4G LTE networks is around 4000 Mbps, although in practice it is around 100 Mbps.

Like any revolution, inaugurating the 5G era is not easy at all. The difficulties are numerous and of a different nature, first of all of technical-infrastructural sort.

The aforementioned difference in peak values with previous technologies can only be accompanied by a significant difference in the technical and infrastructural characteristics.

In fact, they are wildly different not only in terms of the quantity of wider band to be supported and for the speed to be catered, but mostly in terms of the way of managing communications and coverage, with frequencies, antennas, and data transmission techniques that have never been explored in the past.

To add to this already complex picture there is the reticence of public opinion and, consequently, of some fringes of the ruling class.

The fear is that the high electromagnetic frequencies of 5G are harmful to humans, and what is meant by “harmful” there is to indulge.

Carcinogenicity is the most popular concern, but there are also attempts to link 5G to Covid-19 spread.

Pushing towards 5gs

The race towards the 5.0 world is one that involves citizens, companies, and institutions in the definition of a new globalized model of sustainable development, in which technology like the 5G can make accessible to everyone resources, services, and assistance previously available only to a few.

For Italy, this means opening up to the future with a new mentality, giving space to young people to face the transformations taking place with different perspectives and energies, leveraging on the excellence of the country.

This is not yet a shared vision, because of the inertial mechanisms that govern humans that we have just analyzed. In fact, according to the website «Alleanza italiana stop 5G», there are now more than 500 municipal administrations which, only in Italy, have banned the new technology, deeming it harmful to health.

Far more authoritative scientific sources, however, say otherwise. The «Iarc» (international agency for cancer research), to name one, classifies electromagnetic fields at level «2B», the lowest in terms of carcinogenic risk.

I can also mention the correlation 5G – Covid-19, immediately classified as a hoax.

The struggle is however still open: at the same time, while the battles of the committees against 5G are going on, the request for an acceleration in the dissemination of the service was included in the list of priorities for the revitalization of countries, like Italy, where leader task force leader Vittorio Colao inserted such a request in the governmental task force plan.

Slide 27 of such plan shows the need to “adapt the electromagnetic emission levels in Italy to European values” so as to raise the thresholds “to accelerate the development of 5G networks”.

In the document, there is also a passage that seems to be a direct call to the mayors who have opposed to 5G to please open up to this new technology.

In fact, it is asked to “exclude local opposition” to the projects mentioned above “if the national protocols are respected”.

A good portion of the population, however, although not expressly opposed, is skeptical or “coldly discontented”.

But why all this reticence towards novelty? Certainly by the very nature of man, as mentioned before, which sees conservatism as the most effective survival strategy.

The media and social networks also contribute to increasing this psychosis, acting as a sounding board, or even as a first pen of these theories.

The Internet has made the world of information extremely more democratic and plural, certainly a positive condition from the point of view of personal and social freedoms; but it was certainly not a painless revolution.

The incessant flow of news to which we are subjected on a daily basis, coming from the most disparate sources, forces us to do further work: checking the news and selecting the sources.

Since anyone can write and “inform”, it does not make sense to wish for “media empowerment”, but rather a certain critical awareness of the user is increasingly essential.

The ongoing pandemic has taught us two things:

1: A fast internet network capable of supporting a consistent data flow is indispensable.
2: We must trust scientists and experts.

History itself tells that it is in times of need that usually an evolution occurs: we hope not to make an exception.

For now, no impact of bad news on 5G has hit the sector of Telco using such technology. According to data from the Global Mobile Supplier Association, 70 operators worldwide have already launched the commercial network and over 380 are investing as you read.

ELOISA MARCHESONI.

Eloisa Marchesoni is best known as the youngest consultant in the Blockchain and A.I. sector, as well as influential author of articles for the major national and international sector newspapers, in the process of publishing the book “Tokenization processes and new economic paradigms” for Maggioli Editore.

Eloisa is today Token Model Architect n. 1 in Europe, part of the Top 100 Leaders and Influencers of Italy in FinTech and also listed among the World’s Top 50 High Paid Innovation Speakers, acknowledgments that confirm her thriving business as a consultant.

In fact, at just 19 years old, Eloisa founded, together with Casagrande and Arcaro, the Blackchain International Limited, which has established itself in just 8 months as a leading company in the strategic and technical development of projects based on Blockchain and A.I.

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