In Green Bank, you can’t make a call on your cell phone, and you can’t text on it, either. Wireless internet is outlawed, as is Bluetooth. It’s a premodern place by design, devoid of the gadgets and technologies that define life today. And thanks to Uncle Sam, it will stay that way: The town is part of a federally mandated zone where a government high-tech facility’s needs come first. Wireless signals are verboten.
In electromagnetic terms, it’s the quietest place on Earth—blanketed by the kind of silence that’s golden to electrosensitives (people who get sick due to electromagnetic waves). The reason for all the peace and quiet in town is visible the moment you arrive.
It’s the Robert C. Byrd telescope, a gleaming white, 485-foot-tall behemoth of a dish that looms over tiny Green Bank, population 143. The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, a.k.a. the GBT. It’s the largest of its kind in the world and one of nine in Green Bank, all of them government-owned and operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
The telescopes aren’t “ocular” ones, the kind you’re probably thinking of. They’re radio telescopes. So instead of putting your eye to the apparatus and looking for distant stars, you listen for them. The patterns of electromagnetic radiation coming off a planet or other celestial bodies apparently reveal entirely different things than what’s visible to the eye, and even allow scientists to study regions of space where light can’t reach. In recent years, the telescopes have been used to track NASA’s Cassini probe to Saturn’s moon and to examine Mercury’s molten core.
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