The view of a spacecraft moving through the salt water crystals ejected from geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus is a reminder that a liquid ocean beneath its icy surface could potentially provide an environment capable of sustaining some form of life. In a scene on Saturn's moon Titan which is only made imaginable by Titan's relatively low levels of gravity, its thick, hazy atmosphere, and a not-yet-discovered hyper-efficient thermal insulating material, humans fly above the moon's liquid methane sea Ligeia Mare using wings that are approximately the same size - relative to their bodies - as bird wings. The final scene (discussed in more detail below) shows the rings at a distance, lit up by the Sun behind them, casting a luminous glow on Saturn's nighttime cloud tops that Wernquist refers to as "ringshine."
One scene gives an extreme close-up view of Saturn's rings - the perspective is from inside the plane of the rings, looking up from within the jumble of water ice chunks that compose the rings to a person floating just above the plane. Wanderers makes good use of the wealth of information and images returned by the NASA / ESA Cassini–Huygens mission: one third of its scenes depict either Saturn or one of its moons. Wanderers shows adventurers wearing bird-like wings flying over the liquid methane lake Ligeia Mare on Saturn's moon Titan. The film then cuts to the future and shows a large interplanetary spacecraft leaving Earth's orbit, carrying space colonists on their way to another planet or moon. Shining clearly above them in the darkening twilight sky are the five naked eye "wandering stars" in the Solar System which might be visited some day by descendants of the human wanderers. The film begins with a group of nomads around 10,000 BC, travelling through the Middle East on Earth. Wanderers is narrated by astronomer Carl Sagan, reading from his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Of the film's fifteen scenes, Wernquist created some using solely computer graphics, but most are based on actual photographs taken by robotic spacecraft or rovers combined with additional computer-generated elements.
The film depicts actual locations in the Solar System being investigated by human explorers, aided by hypothetical space technology. Wanderers is a 2014 Swedish science fiction short film created by the digital artist and animator Erik Wernquist.
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