When you first drive into the National Radio Quiet Zone—the first of its kind worldwide, spanning 13,000 square miles in Virginia and West Virginia—you won’t know it. The outer edge of the zone includes cities like Charlottesville and Harrisonburg, where life is like pretty much anywhere else.
As you travel deeper into the zone, however, the rugged Appalachian roads narrow and the vibe shifts. The radio dial spins. Gas stations peter out. Cell phone bars drop. Cows stare.
You might start to wonder if you’ve traveled back in time as you cross another invisible boundary into the West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zone (WVRAZ) and enter the “Quietest Town in America,” as the gift shop hats and T-shirts proclaim. The reason for your disconnection becomes visible in the form of West Virginia’s tallest structure: the Green Bank Telescope, 485 feet tall, 17 million pounds, with a 2.3-acre dish designed to “hear” the faint radio signals from cosmic events. It’s like an ear trumpet to the universe, but it only works if the radio noise here on Earth is kept to a minimum. That means no cell service or Wi-Fi at the observatory, for starters. But also: no automatic flushing toilets, Fitbits, or gas-powered vehicles close to the telescopes. All that stuff emits radio frequency interference, which has been restricted here since 1957.
I first arrived at Green Bank in 2017, in search of a place that shared my aversion to always-on technology. I have not owned a cell phone since 2009 (and never a smartphone), and increasingly I feel like an anomaly in a world awash in tech. Pew Research says 91% of Americans today own smartphones, up from 35% in 2011, when the organization issued its first survey on the topic.
To me, life looked richer on the other side of the digital fence, and I wasn’t the only person to think so. The observatory was then hosting around 30 media visitors a year, including TV and film personalities like Katie Couric and Werner Herzog, all in search of that most elusive of things—quiet. There was some irony to it all: Once you tell people where to find quiet, the place becomes less so.
As I discovered while researching my book The Quiet Zone, based on living there for months-long stretches over three years, many local residents and observatory staff actually did have Wi-Fi, smartphones, and almost every other modern gadget, to the consternation of the astronomers. The WVRAZ restricts handheld and household electronics with the threat of a $50 daily fine to noisy rule-breakers, but in fact no fine has ever been levied in the Quiet Zone’s history. In town, the quiet relies on community buy-in.
“If you’re following the rules of the Quiet Zone, you don’t have Wi-Fi,” explains Jill Malusky, the public information manager for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which oversees Green Bank. “If I want to scroll on TikTok and rot my brain with videos, I just plug it in.”
The battle for quiet extends beyond Green Bank to the sites of nearly 1,000 publicly funded radio astronomy observatories located around the world, in places like Chile’s Atacama Desert and the Australian outback. The newest threat to the sensitive equipment, which enables not just astronomical research but also planetary defence and high-precision geolocation services, comes from satellites. By the end of 2023, more than 5,000 satellites orbited Earth, with plans for hundreds of thousands more. Today, 99.5% of the NRQZ is within range of high-speed satellite internet service. “Satellite constellations are impacting observatories everywhere,” says Malusky. “If the wrong frequencies hit the wrong thing, it can fry the equipment.”
