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.
Man, I love Tom's videos. He has a bunch of short videos like this that you can just binge watch!
cool stuff, view from google maps: https://www.google.ee/maps/place/Green+Bank+Telescope/@44.0917151,-92.1528858,4.5z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x884b6ecff9104eb9:0x3091683ec4a98833!8m2!3d38.4321553!4d-79.8398029
Sounds like a perfect spot for Jill Stien to hide from all the scary wifi waves.
I've been to Green Bank a couple of times. Even things like using a microwave oven are enough to get a visit from the authorities, so it's interesting to visit the town even just for the novelty factor.