Dr. Magda Havas of Trent University in Canada wrote a study about the relationship between electromagnetic fields and diabetes in the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine. Her conclusion was that electromagnetic radiotion does seem to have a causale effect on cells and is the cause of diabetes type 3. The devlopment of a new type of diabetes perhaps caused by a generation of people who only sit in front of their computers.

While I do not have the means to back up her claims – I leave that to the scientists – I would like to point out that I personally always feel much weaker after sitting behind the computer all day. Of course that is partly due to the non-activity and unnaturalness of the position, but still it cant be healthy to have your face in front of a screen all day. Another thing that often bothers me is that, even if you have a somewhat silent computer, it still produces a consistant level of noise that effects the body as well.

What are the long term results of this electromagnetic radiation? Nobody really knows. All we do know is that our society has a real obesity problem and that the number of cancer cases has not decreased but rather shrply increased over the decades. So whatever causes cancer: it just got worse.

Now what could we actually do about this situation? I have thought out some very simple solutions that might be of use to combat a whole spectrum of problems that emerge from the fact that biollions of people, day after day, are exposed to these forms of pollution.

1. I never understood why the computer has to be so close to the user. Have these people never heard of remote controls? Why would anyone want to sit next to or in front of a low level vacuum cleaner sort of sound all day? Its a serious level of noise pollution that will surely effect the human body one way or the other. Simply make remote controlled computers and hang the computercvase itself in the cellar than you also dont need such ridiculously large coolers.

Of course another solution for this is cloud computing. There is no actual need for everyone to have a computer. But cloud computing has political problems. Who controls the information, who owns iit, etc.

2. Why cant there be a device that *translates* the visual input of a screen to our eyes without having a large electromagnetic radiation by having a screen in front of your eyes. Without going into the idea of direct computer-brain interfaces: these will be possible but are potentially extremely dangerous. What actually causes the electromagnteic radiotion of a screen and do we really need screens? What could be an alternative? I haven’t sorted out this part of the problem yet. We need to find an alternative to screens without allowing direct computer-to brain interfaces which at this stage I think are simply far too dangerous.

I do think, though, that the keypoint here is the eye. We dont want to bypass the eye.We need to find a way to connect the eye to the computer. So the brain can keep it independency and the eye can directly receive the visual signals without the use of a screen.

Martijn Benders, Novo Universalis

Novo Universalis is an international think tank consisting of writers, scientists, poets and philosophers who want to help contribute to solving world problems.