Archives for March 2021

When the accom­plished film edi­tor Emer Reynolds first moved up to Dublin from Tip­per­ary it was to study sci­ence at Trin­i­ty Col­lege. But she was soon dis­tract­ed by and divert­ed to the world of film. 

So she was the per­fect can­di­date to tack­le what is one of the most extra­or­di­nary sto­ries of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. Com­bin­ing as she does a pas­sion for sci­ence and a wealth of knowl­edge about the craft of sto­ry­telling. The result­ing film, The Far­thest, is a joy and a won­der to behold.

One of the conun­drums posed by space trav­el is; the fur­ther you go, the more fuel you need to take on board. The more fuel you take, the big­ger the space craft need­ed. And the big­ger the vehi­cle, the more fuel you need. And so on.

But in the late 60s, the boffins at Nasa realised that, once you’d mas­tered the fiendish­ly com­plex maths, you could send a space craft to a plan­et on exact­ly the right tra­jec­to­ry so that it ends up going into orbit around it.

And you could then use that orbit to ‘sling-shot’ the space craft on to wher­ev­er it was that you want­ed it to then go. Once you got it into that ini­tial orbit, there would­n’t be any need for any addi­tion­al fuel.

And that fur­ther­more, for the one and only time in around 176 years, the four main gas giants of Jupiter, Sat­urn, Uranus and Nep­tune would be in align­ment between 1975 and 77. 

So they set about design­ing and build­ing what would become Voy­ager 1 and 2, which were both launched in the late sum­mer of 1977. And what had pre­vi­ous­ly been seen as but four blur­ry dots were sud­den­ly trans­formed into glo­ri­ous, detailed technicolour.

The Far­thest has three com­po­nents. First and fore­most, it’s the nuts and bolts sto­ry of the build­ing and launch­ing of the two space craft, as recount­ed by the indi­vid­u­als involved, a remark­ably large num­ber of whom spoke to Reynolds and her crew. 

Then, it’s the sto­ry of the fabled gold­en record that Carl Sagan over­saw the cre­ation of, and which each vehi­cle car­ries a copy of. This was and is an audio-visu­al record of life here on Earth, should any intel­li­gent life come into con­tact with them at any point in the future.

And final­ly, it’s a gen­tle mus­ing on the nature of human­i­ty. Because, apart from any­thing else, when we are all dead and buried and all signs of what was once life here on this plan­et have long since dis­ap­peared, the only rem­nant of our exis­tence will be car­ried on those two gold­en discs.

The Far­thest is every­thing you’d want in a doc­u­men­tary. Thrilling, uplift­ing and utter­ly com­pelling, you can see the trail­er for The Far­thest here:

And the full doc (which 90 min­utes despite this record­ing clock­ing at 120) is avail­able here:

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