The Farthest Page #7

for this little spacecraft

to go out to the giant planets

is really just exploring

the tiniest closest neighborhood

when you start thinking

about cosmic scales.

BELL:

The distances are almost unfathomable.

These were the fastest spacecraft

that had ever been built

and launched and flown,

and they're travelling

at ten miles per second.

You wouldn't even see it, right?

And yet, even at those

unfathomable by Earth standard speeds,

it takes decades,

decades to get out there

into the outer solar system.

[music playing]

HAMMEL:
I'd like to know

the answer, are we alone?

I'd like to know the answer

to that question.

[music playing]

FERRIS:
The big division

with extraterrestrial life

is not space, it's time.

[music playing]

KRAUSS:
In our galaxy,

our sun is relatively young.

The galaxy's about 12 billion years old,

our sun's four and a half

billion years old,

there are many stars

that are a lot older,

therefore, you could have

imagined some civilization

around such a star that might

have watched our Earth form

over the last

four and a half billion years.

Well, over that last

four and a half billion years,

the only evidence of intelligent life

would have been in the last

fifty or sixty years

by watching Star Trek or I Love Lucy

or whatever signals we sent out,

so even if you knew,

even if someone told you

look at that star,

and then look at the third rock

from that star,

and that's where

you're going to find life.

Even if they knew which object

to look for,

there's only a 50-year period

over five billion years almost

where you'd be able to find

intelligent life.

NICK SAGAN:
If we're alone,

then we're truly unique,

and how did that happen and why us

and how are we so special

and yet in such a kind of far-flung

kind of humdrum part of the universe?

And if we're not alone,

how did we all get here

and can we learn about ourselves

by these other groups out there

and what are they like

and are they the creatures

of our dreams or our nightmares?

[music playing]

NARRATOR:

In the fall of 1980,

Voyager got its first close

views of the planet Saturn.

[light piano music plays]

SMITH:

We started off with images

that were probably no better

than what you can get from the ground,

and then it keeps getting better

and better and better

as you get closer and closer.

What are we going to see

when we get really close?

SPILKER:
Having seen Saturn

in a telescope with the rings

just looking like these little

tiny ears on either side,

to now seeing detail and

the beauty of Saturn's rings,

you know, looking like,

almost like the grooves

on a phonograph record.

BELL:

The rings of Saturn, what are they?

Billions of icy particles,

some the size of a house.

They're enormous, much wider

than many Earths strung together

but less than a kilometer thick.

PORCO:

We get there and we find

that it's a blizzard of features

throughout the rings,

and it got very complex.

[guitar music]

PORCO:

We become junkies who...

This is how you become

a planetary flyby junkie,

it's because you've gone through

one of them

and you just know

it's the greatest feeling

and you want to keep doing it

again and again.

SMITH:
At some point,

perhaps a year or so from now,

it may be possible to put

all of this into perspective,

but right at the moment I cannot recall

being in such a state of euphoria

for any previous planetary encounter,

including our two remarkable

Voyager encounters at Jupiter.

[electric guitar music]

[electric guitar music]

CARL SAGAN:

The largest moon of Saturn,

Titan's the most extraordinary place.

There's a dense methane atmosphere

where a complex organic

chemistry has been going on

for perhaps billions of years,

and we are in a moment

of extraordinary discovery.

CASANI:

We had both spacecraft programmed

to do identical missions at Saturn,

and that was the prime mission

and it involved Titan.

BELL:
There's a huge amount

of scientific interest in Titan

because many people think

that early in our own history,

our own planet may have been like that

with very little oxygen,

lots of hydrocarbons,

very thick, different, smoggy atmosphere

that was changed dramatically

on our planet by life,

so if you want to understand

the starting conditions,

go study Titan.

KOHLHASE:

If Voyager 1 was successful at Titan,

Voyager 2, which is nine months

behind going to Saturn,

would be free to continue to

Uranus and to go on to Neptune.

But it depended upon Voyager 1

succeeding at Titan.

TERRILE:
Because Voyager 1

had to be in a certain place

in order to pass Titan,

it couldn't go on to Uranus and Neptune.

There was just no way

to bend its trajectory

to go anywhere else.

STONE:
Voyager 2 would have

done exactly that same thing

if Voyager 1 had failed,

we would have gone like this,

no more planets.

KOHLHASE:

That would have been really tough.

You gonna try for Titan again

and give up two other worlds...

Uranus and Neptune?

BELL:
So there was a lot

of pressure on Voyager 1.

SODERBLOM:

Mostly what we looked at

was a giant ball of brown smog

with some sort of electric blue

hazes above it.

INGERSOLL:

With the Voyager camera,

you couldn't see through

the clouds and haze.

[radio chatter]

But the radio signal from the spacecraft

passed through the atmosphere

of the moon,

and that gave them a measure

of the pressure at the surface

and also the temperature at the surface,

and so we learned a lot about

Titan from that radio signal.

NARRATOR:

Voyager 1 revealed a world

at nearly 300 degrees

below zero Fahrenheit

that might have lakes of liquid methane

under its smoggy atmosphere.

STONE:

Voyager 1 had succeeded.

And shortly after that,

NASA Headquarters agreed

that we should continue with Voyager 2

on its Uranus trajectory.

NARRATOR:

Voyager 1, its planetary mission over,

sped away from the plane of the planets.

Voyager 2... in part to get

on its trajectory to Uranus...

would have to fly dangerously

close to Saturn's rings.

[music playing]

BELL:
We're getting pictures and

other data back from Voyager 2.

But at some point in time,

it had to go behind the planet,

and that blocks us from getting

radio signals to the Earth,

and that happened to be

in the middle of the night.

It was a period of time, several hours,

that everybody knows we're going to be

out of contact with the spacecraft.

Everybody's expecting

to pop champagne corks

and say hey, we made it,

and all the data's on the tape recorder

because it couldn't be

transmitted to the Earth,

and instead it pops

out of the other side,

and there's all these

crazy error signals

coming from the spacecraft.

Something bad has happened.

[machines beeping]

TERRILE:

Something happened

right around ring-plane crossing,

and the images that were

coming back were blank.

BELL:

People thought maybe it crashed

into the rings of Saturn.

Is this it, is it dead?

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