"For the last 5,000 years, human beings have managed to flourish without this," he says, "so to me it seems a little odd that people now find the absence of cell phones something worth discussing." The 'Ghostbusters' surveillance truck He laughs when quizzed about the lack of cell phone usage here. "If you want to hear quiet noises, you need to keep the noise down." "What we have here is an amazing combination of a very rural atmosphere with extremely high technology," says Jay Lockman, the principal scientist of the Green Bank Telescope. The telescope can hear sounds from hundreds of millions of miles away and attracts some of the leading researchers in the world. Leave your phone and digital camera behind. Several smaller telescopes are sprinkled around it amid 2,700 acres of parkland. The main telescope weighs 17 million pounds, spans about 2 acres wide and stretches 485 feet into the air. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The quiet zone gets drastically more restrictive the closer you get to Green Bank, home to the world's largest steerable radio telescope, the Robert C. So, cell phone use is limited in the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square mile area that limits radio frequency in the eastern half of West Virginia and parts of Virginia, stretching to the Maryland border. Tucked in the Allegheny Mountains, researchers are listening to exploding galaxies at the edge of the universe - a signal that is so faint, it's about a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a watt.Ī cell phone emits about 3 watts and can swamp the sounds that are teaching astronomers how the Milky Way was formed and how it is still evolving. It's not that people are backward or fearful of technology. Even microwaves are frowned upon by the region's scientists. This is where you come to get away from the United States. Great American Stories is an occasional series on the unexpected places and unforgettable characters that help define the country. But in Green Bank, it is the presence of some of the most sophisticated technology on Earth that preserves this rural enclave, a throwback town to yesteryear. Technology is constantly changing how we live and communicate. Where cell phones and wireless devices are banned, their use potentially prosecutable by law. You eventually reach Green Bank, population 143, best known as The Quietest Town in America. Keep driving and hook onto the Potomac Highlands Trail toward that magnificent structure. If you're a city slicker accustomed to continuous connectivity, you might start to panic. You can shake your phone all you want, but it won't help. Your radio spins, unable to pull up any stations. But on a clear day, looking south from the Monongahela National Forest, what looks like a giant white Lego structure emerges from this sea of green.Īnd that's about when it starts. ![]() Mountain Turnpike twists through dense oak, hickory and spruce trees and keeps winding, like a slithering snake, through the mountains that separate Virginia and West Virginia. Story by Wayne Drash and Evelio Contreras, CNN
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