We write to notify you of an important development in the world of communications technology that we are concerned will seriously affect public health.
Starting this year, eight companies are planning to launch more than 11,000 satellites, drones, and lasers for global WiFi coverage from space. These include SpaceX, Facebook, OneWeb, Samsung, Iridium, Globalstar, and Outernet. Additionally, Google's Project Loon would utilize perhaps 100,000 high-altitude balloons at 62,500 feet, beginning January 2016 in the United States and already being deployed in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. All projects would utilize radiofrequency radiation (a class 2B possible human carcinogen). Most would utilize pulse-modulated microwave radiation, a subset of the radiofrequency (RF) radiation spectrum.
Pulse-modulated microwave radiation has been reported by thousands of peer-reviewed studies to cause cancers, DNA damage, infertility, and blood-brain barrier damage. It impairs immune, endocrine, cardiovascular, and neurological functions in humans and ultimately adversely affects all living things. Some satellites will use a very high-frequency portion of the spectrum (millimeter waves) shown to cause cellular resonance effects (http://www.salzburg.gv.at/2001_kositsky_et_al._-_ussr_review-2.pdf).
The scientific community takes this seriously. In 2015, over 200 scientists from more than 38 nations submitted the International EMF Scientist Appeal to the United Nations, UN member states, United Nations Environmental Programme, and the World Health Organization (WHO), requesting that they "exert strong leadership in fostering the development of more protective EMF guidelines, encouraging precautionary measures, and educating the public about health risks, particularly risk to children and fetal development" (www.EMFscientist.org).
Flooding the planet with microwave radiation violates important human rights charters, including the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, several sections of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, international human rights as set out per articles 3 and 25 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and all basic precepts of ethics. Space-based microwave radiation deployments threaten to inundate the planet with RF radiation without informed individual consent or a meaningful option for individual avoidance.
Since wireless transmitters in the upper atmosphere will add to proliferating wireless technologies on the ground (such as wireless utility metering systems and all transmitting antenna components of wireless network equipment and devices), additional dramatic increases in pulse-modulated microwave radiation levels would be anticipated.
Emissions from increased rocket launches to deploy and replace thousands of satellites providing worldwide Internet service would destroy ozone and worsen climate change due to high-altitude exhaust of black carbon. Combined with the detrimental environmental effects RF radiation has on both flora and fauna, including on bees and other pollinators, these global wireless projects may lead to environmental devastation and could cause widespread starvation. Nobel Prize nominee Dr. Robert Becker said in an interview in 2000: "I have no doubt in my mind that, at the present time, the greatest polluting element in the earth's environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields" (http://www.wirelessimpacts.org/science/becker.html).
Likewise, Associate Professor Olle Johansson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden said in an interview on 9th May, 2015, in the Telegraph, UK: "We are living in an environment estimated to contain more than 10 billion times more RF radiation than it did in the 60s. If this environment is safe, we're talking about on the order of 15,000 to 25,000 papers - in peer-reviewed scientific journals - all being wrong. That has never happened before"[Page 23 at: (http://www.es-uk.info/attachments/article/44/esuknews%20August15%20small.pdf)].
As radiation levels could rise a hundred- or a thousand-fold, worldwide, we can expect serious health and environmental consequences. Existing regulations unrealistically view each RF transmitter in isolation and are only meant to protect large male humans from short-term thermal harm. They ignore additive, cumulative, and synergistic effects from multiple exposures and ignore sensitive populations (children, pregnant women, the ill and elderly) (http://www.emrpolicy.org/litigation/case_law/docs/noi_epa_response.pdf).
In 2007, an Australian Parliamentary researcher wrote a 50-page review document comparing the rise in illness and disease since the beginning of the wireless roll-out with the existing studies and scientific predictions. The analysis found that between 1996 and 2007 some diseases and illnesses had increased significantly by 50 percent (http://biocircuitry.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-Joining-the-Dots-now.pdf). A 1997 industry-funded study found that of the mice exposed to RF radiation, 43% developed cancer, compared to 22% in the control group (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9146709). This was regarded by biomedical scientists around the world as highly significant. A 2015 study, by a researcher who formerly declared RF radiation to be cancer safe, found tumor promotion in mice at levels well below exposures experienced by cell phone users (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273324795_Tumor_promotion_by_exposure_to_radiofrequency_electromagnetic_fields_below_exposure_limits_for_humans).
An analysis conducted in the UK for The Sunday Times in 1999 by Professor Gordon Stewart, one of Britain's leading epidemiologists, showed a significant increase in the risk of cancers (including leukemia) associated with mobile phone masts. The study revealed an increased incidence of cancer within 7 kilometers of masts. Subsequent inquiries unearthed cancer clusters in London, Bedfordshire, South Wales, and the Midlands. Studies of the sites show high incidences of cancer, brain hemorrhages, and high blood pressure within a radius of 400 yards of mobile phone masts (http://www.feb.se/Bridlewood/NEWS1999.HTM#tv).
"In individuals genetically predisposed to certain forms of cancer, the long-term intermittent exposure to RF such as those used by mobile phones may be an important stimulus in the induction of malignancy," wrote Peter French, Principal Scientific Officer, Centre for Immunology, St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, in 2001 (http://emrstop.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_details&gid=46&Itemid=18).
Cancer is not the only risk. Recent research found that average teenage young men with no familial history of type 2 diabetes exposed to an RF field five times higher than their matched counterparts were significantly more likely to experience pre-diabetes (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4661664/pdf/ijerph-12-14519.pdf). RF was previously linked to blood sugar effects in the literature, and this study strongly suggests that additional RF exposure would further increase the incidence of type 2 diabetes.
The 1,500-page BioInitiative Report on RF/MW health effects was published in 2012. The authors are 29 scientists from 10 countries. They reviewed thousands of studies showing interference with chemical processes in the body, implicating RF/MW in a broad spectrum of alarming effects including genetic damage, cancer, immune dysfunction, neurological injury, and infertility (www.bioinitiative.org).
With medical disasters such as Thalidomide, tobacco, and asbestos, only select groups in the population were exposed. Plans for the entire population to be involuntarily exposed to toxic radiation, with no regard to the dangers elucidated by the peer-reviewed literature, are unconscionable.
We urge you to review the enclosed information on the environmental hazard posed by rocket exhaust and our filing to the Federal Communications Commission (https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=170563&x=.). We invite you to suggest, discuss, and/or initiate with your international colleagues ways in which your organization can help protect public health - perhaps by recommending a moratorium on space-based and high-altitude wireless technology deployment until the relevant legislators, agencies, regulators, and the general public fully understand the toxic nature of this radiation hazard on human health.
Enclosures: Rocket Exhaust Fact Sheet
Informal Objection to Google, Inc. Experimental License Application