Tucked away in a valley in the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia, is this:
the Green Bank Radio Telescope,
the largest steerable radio telescope in the world.
Now if you're building an optical telescope,
something that looks at the stars,
then you want to be on top of a mountain,
you want to get through as much of Earth's atmosphere as you can.
But a radio telescope needs to be isolated
from all the radio noise that humanity produces.
Now, one way is to build it in the middle of a load of mountains.
Solid rock does a pretty good job of shielding.
But another way is to get everyone around you to just shut up.
Welcome to the National Radio Quiet Zone.
...er, this is where I would have used a big, sweeping drone shot
to get a dramatic picture.
But remote control isn't allowed here.
The job of the Green Bank telescope is actually really, really flexible,
from looking at objects in the solar system
to looking at objects halfway across the universe and further.
It was instrumental in uncovering the molten core of Mercury.
It helped resolve a sort of controversy in astronomy
about the distance to a nearby star cluster.
And that might sound a little bit mundane,
but measuring distances in astronomy is very hard.
And one of the biggest projects the telescope does right now
is also looking for living things out there in space.
It’s called the Breakthrough Listen project,
and it’s a search for extraterrestrial intelligence using the Green Bank telescope
and other facilities like it throughout the world.
The Quiet Zone is roughly a rectangle,
about 100 miles on each side.
And since 1958,
the US Government has put strict limits on transmissions within the Zone.
Partly for this telescope, and partly because of a much more secure military facility
thirty miles away that listened to more earthly communications.
Some folks writing about the Quiet Zone,
they say that all transmissions are banned for the whole hundred miles,
but that's not true: there are cities within the wider parts of the Zone,
and the folks there happily use wifi and cell phones.
It's the Quiet Zone, not the Silent Zone.
Out there, the rules are about big transmitters,
the kind that put out TV and radio signals:
they're required to use low-powered,
directional antennas rather than just spraying signal everywhere.
Within ten miles of here, though,
the rules start becoming a bit more strict.
This telescope is sensitive enough that,
if it was pointed the right way,
it could pick up a signal with the equivalent energy of one snowflake hitting the ground.
And even if it's not pointed right at you,
it's got two acres of surface area
to hear your phone screaming for cell towers that just aren't there.
Living in a place without a cell phone is definitely an interesting change.
Before two years ago, I did have a cell phone,
could look up anything I wanted on Google.
You know, after a week of living here?
I didn’t even really notice it.
The only difference is that you have to plan things ahead more
if you want to go out with your friends — you plan in advance,
or you say “I’ll meet up with them when I meet up with them”.
Things like that.
And many, many people have come and gone,
stayed for weeks or months at a time,
and really none of them have ever said “man, I really miss my cell phone”.
In the nearby town of Green Bank, anything that transmits,
whether it’s baby monitors or wireless doorbells, is banned.
So is anything that might cause interference.
Microwave ovens aren’t allowed.
Power lines have to be buried four feet underground.
The observatory buildings near the telescope are huge Faraday cages,
keeping all the emissions inside.
So this is the anechoic chamber that I test in.
I first test the device itself to see what the emissions are,
then design a box for it, put it back in the chamber,
and see if I did a good job or not.
Things like cameras, for instance,
need to see high frequency electromagnetic energy, namely light,
and yet we’re trying to keep them from emitting lower frequency electromagnetic energy.
Usually we use a mesh embedded in glass that’s very fine,
and so it doesn’t distort the image too much.
Once you're within a mile of the telescope,
the restrictions are so severe that only diesel cars are allowed.
Regular gasoline cars: they cause too much interference from the spark plugs inside.
Folks who say they're hypersensitive to electromagnetic fields move to this area:
and even if pretty much all the evidence says it's in their heads,
they still feel better for being here.
The scientists, however, have more practical concerns.
Mostly my work here deals with radio-frequency interference on site,
and also doing routine runs to see if there’s anything new out there.
We have a monitoring station down on site,
and then we’ll jump in the truck.
And we have direction finding equipment in the truck.
We just basically have to look at it with the receiver and the spectrum analyser
and just drive around and watch the signal peak or fall away.
It is getting more difficult.
Because there’s more and more wireless stuff out there.
The wireless genie is out of the bottle.
And there’s so many things out there —
the Internet of Things is creeping into almost every device.
Refrigerators now have hotspots in them.
When we go around and scan for wi-fi hotspots,
there’s always three or four printers out there.
The strangest one I’ve heard of was an electric pad in a doghouse.
There was some arcing inside the pad,
and it was generating a lot of RFI, so…
My predecessor’s the one that found that one,
and they fixed it by buying the guy a new heater for the doghouse!
Thank you to everyone at the Green Bank Observatory
and all the staff at the radio telescope.
I am kind of overwhelmed to be up here,
I am so grateful to all of them,
please, pull down the description,
check out the links, and go see what they do.