In the ‘Quietest Town in America,’ Does True Silence Actually Exist?

It is part of silentA collection of stories that highlight our discovery for peace in a fast noise world. Read more here.

When you drive for the first time in the national radio cool field – the first of its kind worldwide, Virginia and West Virginia is 13,000 square miles – you will not know it. The outer edge of the zone includes cities such as Charlotsville and Harrisonburg, where life is like elsewhere.

As you travel deeply in the zone, however, narrow and vibe shifts to the rugged Appalachian roads. Radio dial rotates. Gas station Peter out. Cell phone bar drop. Staring at the cows.

If you cross another invisible border in the West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zone (WVRAZ), you can travel back on time and enter the “most cool city in the US” as a declaration of gift shop haats and T-shirts. The reason for your disconnection appears as the tallest structure of West Virginia: Green Bank Telescope, 485 feet long, with a dish of 17 million pounds, 2.3 acres, designed to “hear” unconscious radio signals from cosmic phenomena. It is like an ear trumpet for the universe, but it only works when radio noise is kept minimal here on Earth. This means that there is no cell service or Wi-Fi in the observatory for starters. But also: There is no automatic flushing toilets, fitbits or gas-operated vehicles close to binoculars. All the goods emit radio frequency intervention, which has been banned here since 1957.

I first reached the Green Bank in 2017, looking for a place that always shared my contradiction on technology. I have not owned a cell phone since 2009 (and never smartphone never), and fast I think I wake up in a tech like an discrepancy in the world. Pu Research says that 91% of Americans today made their smartphone of smartphones from 35% in 2011, when the organization released its first survey on the subject.

For me, life looked rich on the other side of the digital fence, and I was not the only person to think so. The Observatory was then hosting about 30 media visitors in a year, in which KT Cortic and Wirener are looking for the most elusive of all things, including TV and film celebrities, such as Herzog. All this was irony: Once you tell people where to go quietly, the space decreases.

As I discovered while researching my book Cool area, Many local residents and observatory employees had actually Wi-Fi, smartphones and almost every other modern gadgets, which were occupied by astronomers, on the basis of living there for months to stay there for months-to stay there for months. WVRAZ banned handheld and domestic electronics for noise for daily fine of $ 50, but has not actually been imposed any fine in the history of a quiet area. In the city, a quiet community depends on buying.

“If you are following the rules of the quiet area, you don’t have Wi-Fi,” Jil Maluski, the public information manager of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, explains the Green Bank. “If I want to scroll on Tikokkok and rotate my brain with a video, I plug it in.”

In NRQZ, cell service and Wi-Fi have been banned to protect radio telescopes in Green Bank (painted above) from radio frequency intervention.

Photos from book Drake equation – Andrew Phelps and Paul Kranzler

In places such as the Atakama desert and Australian outbacks of Chile, around 1,000 publicly funded worldwide has spread beyond Green Bank to sites of radio astronomy observatories. The newest threat to sensitive devices, which enables not only astronomical research but also planetary protection and high-accurate geolocation services, comes from satellites. By the end of 2023, more than 5,000 satellites revolve around the Earth, with hundreds of thousands of plans. Today, 99.5% high -speed satellite of NRQZ is within the internet service limit. “Satellite constellations are affecting observatories everywhere,” Maluski says. “If wrong frequencies hit the wrong thing, it can fry the device.”