The Town Where WIFI Is Illegal (And Yes, People Actually Live There)

The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is home to a super powerful telescope that needs electromagnetic silence to do its important research. But is that even possible anymore?

- Matt Blitz

It’s the first of October and Route 92 into town is lined with trees dressed with greens, oranges, and yellows. Autumn is refreshingly crisp and colourful here in Green Bank, West Virginia. The road winds and curves past a convenience store, a school, a library, and a post office. There are no shopping plazas, fast-food restaurants, office buildings, or apartment complexes here. There’s also no cell service.

What is here, though, is one of the world’s most important facilities for the understanding of our universe.

Right off of the road and nestled in a valley naturally protected by the Allegheny Mountains is the Green Bank Observatory (GBO). It opened in 1958 as the United States’s first national radio astronomy observatory and remains a crucial facility. It houses a number of active telescopes, including the world’s largest steerable radio telescope, the Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope, or GBT.

Over the last six-plus decades, the discoveries made at Green Bank have come to define astronomy. Its telescopes have found black holes, pulsars, radiation belts, and gravitational waves. In September 2019, researchers at the GBO uncovered the most massive neutron star ever detected.

Green Bank is also where serious search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research was born. In 1960, Frank Drake started Project Ozma here, the first US government-funded attempt to listen for extraterrestrial intelligence. It’s also where he wrote his famed equation about the possibility of worlds other than ours. And SETI work is still ongoing at Green Bank. Last year, one million gigabytes of SETI data collected over the previous three years was released to the public, making it the largest trove ever of its kind.