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Correlation implies causation (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 38 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (14 children)

Infrasound. Proven Possible (>100dB is absolutely harmful though, lower levels are object of studies now and testing on humans yielded inconclusive results) negative impact on people's health and general wellbeing, waves travel quite far and have high penetration, and data centers are absolutely the source of it with all the fans and pumps.

Not saying that there 1:1 causation here, but having a data center around will absolutely make you miserable, and dizzy too.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    How far does that actually travel, and how does that compare to other bad stuff that has been around longer, like refineries or power substations or whatever?

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  • [–] 20 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    data centres have been around for decades as well, I believe it's the new hyper scaler data centres that possibly have this infrasound thingo

    But that's nothing related to a google trend graph of dizziness and data centres, that's as the OP says, random

    These are great:

    https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    Where I live there's a refinery, about ten years ago they changed the burners on the tall torches for a new kind that burn apparently cleaner but they make a lot more noise. It is 6km away with no direct line of sight, the low pitch rumble makes some of the windows in my house rattle.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo

    Same link without the tracking parameter.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    I’m a big Benn Jordan fan but he missed the mark on this one. See this detailed rebuttal. Sniping between the author and Jordan on Blue Sky aside, he makes a lot of good points about how the research does not show negative health impacts related to infrasound.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    So, you may have noticed that 5 GHz Wi-Fi has smaller coverage area than 2.4 GHz.

    It works that way all the way down to infrasound, which is <20 Hz, and natural examples would be whale communications (thousands of kilometers) or volcano eruptions (infrasound wave from Krakatoa eruption lapped around entire globe multiple times).

    As for human factors - basically any big industrial tech object is gonna be the source of ultrasound. So it's kind of safe to assume that infrasound from data centers may be "heard" from at least several kilometers away. Dunno how it compares to refineries and power substations - but they're also source of that.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    At night I could hear a train idle from a kilometer away through town easily. That was still in the audible range, not infrasound, and also it was literally just the engine idling, not the train being driven - not super loud even if standing next to it. A bit louder than a car.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    Has it been proven? I see articles that suggest pathways or mechanisms.

    But when I looked for a double blind study with controls, they do not find any effects at all. Arguably the majority of studies are around 8 hour periods or sleep period, not 24 hour exposure. But you would think they would find something. They did hearing tests, blood test, brain activity tests, and emotional response "feeling" scores. It just isnt there conclusively.

    People started doing a lot of this research because of the wind turbines, which also are very loud, run as long as their is wind, and produce infrasound.

    Don't get me wrong: I am not defending putting loud constant noise machines near people, this should be part of a zoning regulation. That seems bad enough, infrasound or not.

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