The Farthest Page #6

could have 10 times

the volcanic activity of Earth,

which was the only known

active volcanoes

in the solar system were here on Earth.

And then there's Io.

Suddenly we had realized

this was a different journey we were on.

NARRATOR:

Io's volcanoes can shoot lava

over 200 miles into space.

These eruptions are powered

by Jupiter's gravity,

which endlessly compresses

and releases the moon.

SODERBLOM:

I wanted to say one other thing,

we've been saying that perhaps

there's some funny way

in which Jupiter gobbles up all

the things that are coming in

and doesn't let Io be hit by any.

Well, we aimed a spacecraft

and went very close,

and had we missed we would have

made the first impact crater.

[laughter]

SODERBLOM:
The flyby

is basically a week-long affair

that's 24 hours a day.

It's intense.

ANNOUNCER:

There will be a Voyager report

in 30 seconds.

[electric guitar music]

BELL:

Instant science,

because there's going to be

a press conference that night.

This picture comes down,

and you've got three hours

to figure out what's going on

and then tell the world about it.

Oh, no pressure there, right?

[heavy guitar music]

TERRILE:

The confines of being a piece of biology

got in the way of that.

I mean, you got hungry,

you got tired, you know,

you had to go to the bathroom,

I mean, you're going to miss something,

you don't want to miss anything

because every 48 seconds

a new image would come down.

[heavy guitar music]

INGERSOLL:
No one got any sleep

during one of these flybys

when the spacecraft

would go zooming past.

The photo labs were working

day and night,

and people were sleeping in their cars.

[heavy guitar music]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: It was just

way too exciting to... to sleep.

[heavy guitar music]

[heavy guitar music ends and fades out]

NARRATOR:

During its Jupiter encounter,

Voyager revealed a feature

of the giant planet

never seen before.

Jupiter had something in common

with its flashier neighbor, Saturn.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: The engineer

in charge of the camera came in,

and he was like, Candy,

what have you done?

What is the matter with our camera?

And I looked at it and went,

ah, it's Jupiter's ring.

It went from being

you've broken the camera

to, "This is the first picture

ever of Jupiter's ring."

[atmospheric piano music]

TERRILE:

Jupiter was a game-changer.

Jupiter reset all the registers.

Now we're really up for something.

And to know that this was just

the very, very beginning

of this journey.

If we're blown away by Jupiter,

just wait until we get to Saturn.

[electronic version

of atmospheric motif]

NARRATOR:
The journey to Saturn

would take over a year

and bring Voyager and its message

one tiny step closer to other stars

where, just possibly,

intelligent aliens might discover it.

[atmospheric music on strings]

[atmospheric rhythmic music]

The Golden Record contained

the call of a humpback whale

and greetings in 55 human languages.

Most were recorded

at Cornell University,

where Carl Sagan was

professor of astronomy.

[atmospheric rhythmic music]

NICK SAGAN:

My father was Carl Sagan,

and my mother is Linda Salzman Sagan,

and she's a writer and an artist

and she designed

the iconic Pioneer plaque,

she actually drew it,

and she's the one

who got all the greetings

for the Voyager Golden Record.

I like to think of her,

that she kind of put together

a kind of a choir of voices

of greetings to the stars.

[recordings of voices

with rock music plays]

JANET STERNBERG:

The greetings to the universe

are almost like proto-tweets,

the first tweets,

keep it short, keep it simple,

and there was a limit to what

they could put on the record.

It's like kind of a tasting menu.

It's enough to get the aliens

to understand that, um, we're diverse.

NICK SAGAN:

My parents wanted a child

to have a voice of one of the voices,

and they just came to me one day

and said, Nick, if you'd like

to leave a message to aliens

if they happen to exist,

what would you like to say to them?

[tape rewinding]

SAGAN AS A CHILD:

Hello from the children of planet Earth.

NICK SAGAN:
"Oh, hello from

the children of planet Earth,"

that's what I would say to aliens.

They loved that, and so it's

like great, let's record you.

It's a bit of a blur.

Like the only thing that I know

that I remember from that time

is those knobs

and the little recording level

that goes into the red

if you speak too much,

this 70s, kind of, um...

so I remember that,

and I remember watching

the needle move as I spoke

and seeing where it got,

oh, that got close to the red

but actually didn't go into the red,

OK, that's probably good.

And that was that.

And then I, you know,

drank my apple juice

and went back to my books.

It was really not

till considerably later

that the kind of enormity of

what that meant actually hit me.

[greetings in various languages]

[greetings in various languages]

KOHLHASE:

Well, that brings up the whole question,

is there anybody out there?

Listen, there are, give or take,

200 billion stars

in the Milky Way galaxy.

There are about 200 billion

galaxies in the universe,

or at least in the universe

we know about.

HAMMEL:

It's a pretty small spacecraft,

and it's a pretty big universe.

If you take a piece of sky

the size of a soda straw

up there in the Big Dipper

in that tiny piece of what

we thought was blank sky,

there's thousands of galaxies.

And each one of those galaxies

is filled with billions of stars.

That's just the soda straw,

and now you imagine the whole sky filled

with thousands upon thousands

upon thousands of galaxies,

each of which is billions

and billions of stars,

there's a lot of possibility out there.

[atmospheric guitar music]

PORCO:

There has to be other civilizations,

the numbers just compel it.

It would be almost

statistically impossible

for there not to be other life forms

and other life forms that have evolved

to a state of intelligence.

NARRATOR:

But the chance that an intelligent alien

might encounter Voyager

also hinges on another factor...

the sheer vastness of space.

SODERBLOM:

The bigger you think space is,

the less probable it is

you're going to find them

because they're needles

in infinite haystacks.

KRAUSS:
If you want to realize

how empty our galaxy is,

the nearest galaxy to our own

is Andromeda,

it's about two million light years away.

It's on a collision course

with us right now,

and in five billion years

that galaxy's going to collide

with our own.

And you might say, oh, no, oh, no,

but it turns out space is,

even in our galaxy,

it's mostly empty space.

When our two galaxies collide,

almost no stars will hit any other star.

CASANI:
There's just a lot of

room out there, a lot of room.

BAGENAL:
Once you start getting

into the astronomical scales,

our solar system is pretty tiny,

and so this adventure of Voyager

which seems so remote and distant

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