- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage.
Some of it is definitely silly, but if it is outputting ultrasound, it very well could be causing health issues.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8954895/
I’ve certainly heard cooling fans output loud high pitched whines, so it wouldn’t shock me to hear that they were putting out loud ultrasonic whines.
Ultrasound falls off quickly and is very easily blocked by obstructions. Bitcoin didn’t invent ultrasound, or computers either, for that matter. Even if it had an effect, then we’d see people dropping dead in electronics stores.
Well, if this were plausible, you would expect to hear a lot more complaints from people who live and work near datacenters. But we don’t, so I think it’s pretty easy to conclude that these computers aren’t emitting ultrasound, or if they are that it isn’t the source of the issue.
Do you know how loud ultrasound has to be just to travel a few meters through the air? People would basically have to be living inside the datacenter even if these things were converting half their energy input into deliberately generating ultrasound.