plans out there, you have to have it.
“When I walk around my house, I’m
silent,” she said. “I think people have lost
the ability to be present with themselves.
There’s nothing wrong with sitting on
your deck looking at the hills. I don’t even
have an answering machine.” Because
they’re hard-wired, answering machines are
allowed here, if you want one. And though
homeowners must agree to do without
Wi-Fi, they can connect to the internet
through an Ethernet cable.
What if, instead of going all in on
mobile phones in the early 2000s,
we just hadn’t? Now the phone is a
magic wand that can summon pizza,
or a car, or a friend, or a booty call.
We can ruin our lives in the space of a
few moments—by buying drugs from
China, or with an ill-advised comment
at 3 a.m., or by getting tangled up in a
stranger’s fantasies. Sometimes, pulling
my phone out of my pocket, I feel the
way I do when I’m standing on the roof-
top of a tall building, like maybe some
impulse will send me hurtling into the
air. It’s glorious, to be equipped with all
of this magic and danger every moment
of the day. It’s also exhausting.
At twilight, I parked near a long, low
laboratory building and walked through
the gates of the observatory, beyond
which no gas-powered cars are allowed
(because spark plugs). I passed the row of
telescopes and found a dirt path into the
woods. The darkness dropped, and the out-
lines of my body disappeared. Baby frogs—
peepers—chirped and creaked, filling the
air with their own static. Deer crashed
around the brush or scooted across the
path in front of me, invisible in the dark
but for their white tails.
My fingers twitched for the cellphone that
wasn’t there. Then I stopped myself. When
we talk about privacy, we tend to think
about people spying on us online and har-
vesting our data. But just as dangerous—
perhaps more so—is the way that the
omnipresent, in-your-pocket internet can
coax us into destroying our own inner
wilderness.
O
N MY FINAL day in town, the
observatory’s largest instrument,
the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank
Telescope, shut down for maintenance, and
I was allowed to summit it. The telescope is
taller than the Statue of Liberty and one of
the largest manufactured, steerable objects
on the face of our planet. An elevator that
jerked like an amusement-park ride took us
to the top, where a steel walkway led out
onto the surface of the dish, a 2-acre white
expanse. I watched a maintenance worker
The last word^37
moonwalk across its bouncy surface. He
appeared to be lost in a white desert, the
blue sky hanging below him like a lake.Mike Holstine, the business manager and
spokesman for the Green Bank Obser va-
tory, told me there’s so much we can learn
from the telescope—from the location of
near-Earth asteroids to the way that mat-
ter first began to congeal into stars. Such
scientific observations depend on signals asever-present hum of the internet drowning
those out too?
Holstine said that here in Green Bank, “I
use the internet, and then I walk away.”
But on the outside, people are “connected
all the time,” he added. “They get a text
and have to look at it. For a lot of people,
the choice seems like it has disappeared.
The phone is part and parcel to everything
they do, including work. It’s the tail wag-
ging the dog.” After a few days here,
almost entirely offline, I felt I knew
what he meant: The world outside
the mountains now seemed mad to
me too.
How can we protect resources like
starlight, quiet, and obscurity that
have little value in the marketplace?
Astronomers have been thinking
about that question for decades, and
they have come up with an answer:
International Dark Sky Places. In
these protected areas, you can wan-
der under a splatter of stars and
grapple with the evidence of your
own insignificance in a vast universe.
The Central Idaho reserve became the
first International Dark Sky Reserve
in the United States in 2017. With
1,400 square miles protected from
artificial light, it attracts astro-tourists
from around the world.
But we have no similar protections
for disconnection, privacy, and offline com-
munities. And if no one advocates for these
intangibles, the last quiet places will soon
be gone. In 2012, the National Science
Foundation considered a proposal to shut
down the Green Bank observatory—and
ended up slashing its support by about
40 percent. Nowadays, the observatory
depends on private foundations and uni-
versities to make up the shortfall. If the
observatory were to disappear, then so,
too, presumably, would the National Radio
Quiet Zone.
When I packed up the car and drove out of
Green Bank, I was confident that I knew
how to find my way. But almost immedi-
ately, I turned the wrong way at a fork in
the road and realized I was lost. I decided
to savor the experience. After all, how
often these days do you have a chance to
be lost? The road led me past old rail yards
and toward a river, where I plunged in and
waded, slip-sliding on the rocks.
Soon I would cross into the land where the
internet begins. But for now, I was on this
side of the line. For now, I was dark.This story originally appeared in The New
York Times. It has been edited and con-
densed for The Week.The telescope, photographed with a mechanical cameraweak as “a billionth of a billionth of a bil-
lionth of a watt,” he said.
For years, microwave ovens have been
tightly regulated in Green Bank because
they can obliterate those barely detectable
signals from billions of years ago. But what
are scientists supposed to do now that just
about every household object—from toaster
to battery—is chattering to the internet?
The situation has become so dire that
scientists are preparing for what you
might call The End of Quiet. Ellie White,
a student at Marshall Uni ver sity who has
been volunteering and doing research at
the observatory since she was 14, told me
that experts at the observatory are working
on ways to detect and remove unwanted
interference caused by, say, a tourist speed-
ing through town in a car equipped with
Bluetooth. The idea is to be able to identify
the human-made signals and strip them
out of the data, so that it’s still possible to
tune in the most subtle emanations from
light-years away. Imagine noise-canceling
headphones for the universe.
But who will save the endangered Quiet
Zone inside our own heads? What about
the thoughts as subtle as the static caused
by the Big Bang and the transmissions from
the remote galaxies of our memories? Is the