From a reader:
Jonah,
Just another two cents on the whole space silence thing. Don’t forget the
old subject/object paradigm and that, even in the vacuum of space, as long
as there’s a human ear to measure it, we can never experience complete
silence. Composer John Cage explained it famously (at least to the music
world) after visiting an anaechoic chamber at Harvard:
(I) “heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the
engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system
in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage
http://www.bell-labs.com/org/1133/Research/Acoustics/AnechoicChamber.html