Maxwell's Silver Hammer 275
Higher
microwave
bands
are
crowded
with
more
military
talk
channels
and
radar,
navigational
beacons,
commercial
communica-
tions satellites, various kinds of walkie-talkies, and America's two
hundred fifty thousand microwave phone and TV relay towers.
Like the infrared rays above them in the spectrum, radio waves
and
microwaves
produce
heat
when
directed
in
high-intensity
beams.
Hence
they're
used
for
all
sorts
of
industrial
chores—
bonding
plywood,
vulcanizing
rubber,
manufacturing
shoes,
ster-
ilizing food, making plastics, and heat sealing the trillions of plas-
tic-wrapped products in our stores, even opening oysters. Modern
electronics
would
be
impossible
without
the
perfect
silicon
and
germanium crystals grown in microwave furnaces.
The human species has changed its electromagnetic background more
than any other aspect of the environment. For example, the density of
radio waves around us is now 100 million or 200 million times the
natural level reaching us from the sun. Nor is there any end in sight.
When superconducting cables are introduced, they'll increase the field
strength around power lines by a factor of ten or twenty. Electric cars,
magnetically levitated transport vehicles, and microwave-beam satellites
for transmitting solar power to earth would each add strong new sources
of electromagnetic contamination. A proposed electromagnetic catapult
that could shoot satellites into space from mile-long rails built up the
side of a mountain would require the combined output of the country's
thousand generating stations for the few seconds of each launch.
A few years ago most investigators believed that each wavelength in-
teracted mainly with objects comparable to it in size. This was a com-
forting notion that theoretically limited each frequency to one type of
effect and predicted that really troublesome problems for humans would
come from only one portion of the spectrum—the FM band. Now, how-
ever, we know there are primary effects on all life-forms at ELF frequen-
cies, and in other parts of the spectrum there can be consequences for
specific systems at any level, from the subatomic to the entire biosphere
as a unit.
Of course, a change at one level may well trigger secondary changes
throughout an organism, so that the original one is hard to identify.
Moreover, the impact of EMR ar any particular frequency is often related
to its power density, the amount of energy streaming through a certain
area. When discussing biological effects, this is best measured in micro-
watts (millionths of a watt) per square centimeter, a unit we'll simplify
to microwatts. There's often no direct relationship between dose and
effect, however; a low power density sometimes does things that a