To infinity and beyond

An entirely Irish production, The Farthest succeeds on many levels but perhaps most of all as a philosophical exploration of what it means to be human.

The film, which is available to watch on the RTE Player until October 5 2017, examines humanity’s drive to explore.

Directed by Emer Reynolds, The Farthest documents the magnificent Voyager space machines, interviews the people who built them and examines the vision that propelled Voyager I and II to boldly go further than anyone could have dared to hope.

 

As a Voyager scientist explains, less than one lifetime ago humanity didn’t even know about the existence of the 100 billion galaxies that are out there.

The unmanned Voyager robotic probes have travelled further than any human invention ever before. The film uses this feat to examine the human urge to communicate and to seek meaning in existence.

Mission

The Farthest includes interviews with 30 of the original scientists and engineers who built and flew the ground-breaking mission, many of them now in their seventies but holding fast to their burning passion for the project.

“We long to know the meaning of our existence,” as one of them says passionately.

“The most beautiful thing about science is the ideas,” says another.

The Voyager project was conceived under President Nixon in 1972 and finally reached interstellar space in 2012 under President Obama, 34 years after it left the earth. This was the first object created by humanity to move beyond our known galaxy.

The probes were built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which is managed by the legendary CalTech (California Institute of Technology) nearby.

“It was the size of a small school bus, gangly but graceful,” one scientist recalled. He said the probe was built by the ‘what-if’ people, who had to mitigate for every conceivable thing that could go wrong billions of light years away from earth.

It was decided to include a golden record which would explain human life to aliens.

The gold metal-pressed LP contained greetings in 55 languages, a child’s voice saying “hello from the children of planet earth”, the sound of a humpback whale and 27 pieces of music - glorious music, on the grounds that music is a universal language.

The musical choice is quirky and idiosyncratic and ranges from Beethoven’s Fifth to Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode.

The film tells how comedian Steve Martin mocked up a cover of Time magazine with a response from alien civilizations: “Send more Chuck Berry”.

The probes have been travelling without a collision for the past 38 years at ten miles per second. Yet a current-day smartphone contains 240,000 times more memory than either one of them.

Advocates

One of Voyager’s leading advocates was the late astronomer, scientist and educator Carl Sagan.

He urged that Voyager be turned around to take photographs as it finally left the known galaxy and entered interstellar space in February 1990.

The resultant photograph showed planet Earth as a tiny point of light, a blue dot in a shaft of sunlight.

“That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

“To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known,” he said at the time.

In The Farthest, the highs and lows along the Voyager journey are charted using original footage from press conferences.

There’s the thrill of discovering the plumes that proved that Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Then came the disappointment of the images from “bland and unphotogenic” Uranus.

After the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart in 1986, killing the seven-member crew 73 seconds after lift-off, the team saw the press benches empty out. Space was no longer sexy.

The Farthest tells the whole fabulous story in a manner that is entirely gripping and elevated with the use of beautifully chosen 1970s music, from the opening bars of Rose Royce’s Wishing On A Star, to Gallagher and Lyle’s Breakaway, The Carpenters’ Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft and Pink Floyd’s Us and Them.

The scientists and engineers describe the intense sadness they will feel when the Voyager eventually stops communicating with planet Earth. Yet the whole film is imbued with an irresistible 1970s sunny optimism that only adds to its appeal.

The Farthest was produced by John Murray and Clare Storage for Crossing the Line Films. See it now on the RTE Player.