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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

Maybe in Europe, but in the US there is a ridiculous amount of untouched space a <20 miles from almost every major city with the exception of California and the north east.

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Surprisingly, this isn't really true (as far as noise is concerned). Noise pollution travels far, and if you're using sensitive equipment, you can easily pick up the noise of planes flying nearby at 30,000 ft.

This is in fact how airplanes were detected before radar was invented. Not a joke.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/aircraft-detection-radar-19...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location

Now you've made me want to dress up as an Airplane Detector for Halloween!

Standing on a mountaintop in Yosemite, I could easily hear the airplanes above, one approximately every few minutes.

It turns out there is no where you can go in the United States that is more than 20 miles from a paved road.

Is there a citation for that? I’d guess there are large parts of northern Maine that only have logging roads.

There are a bunch of articles about it but nothing scientific. For example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42104894

And it turns out I was wrong. There is one spot 21.7 miles away from a road deep in Wyoming.

This is highly dubious. Logging roads might be considered "roads" but some are passable only by heavy equipment. If you have to stop and repair the road every few hundred meters then I don't think it counts as a road.

Not sure if that’s true but even if it is, 20 miles is a massive distance.

If you ever go camping far out in the wilderness you will realise how hard it is to get away from human noise at night. The sound of planes flying overhead is almost constant over the entire continental US, even in desolate and wild areas.

Maybe the Colorado Rocky Mountains are different, but they don’t have plane noise like that outside of the corridor the interstate follows, which the planes also mostly follow.

It definitely looks like there are some larger plane traffic gaps out that way compared to here in the midwest, but if you look at a live map (https://www.flightradar24.com/41.21,-101.72/6 ) they are still flying over even the remote areas pretty frequently unfortunately.

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