Hartelijke Groeten aan Iedereen – or Warm Greetings to Everyone

A golden record from the people of Belgium was transmitted into deep space by SentForever this week. In the final episode of this six-week prime time TV Een series,Tom Waes concluded his global trip at Goonhilly in Cornwall, UK.

There he asked us if SentForever would transmit a golden record containing a video message showing the life and success of Belgian people into eternity. Tom had been round the world speaking with various people about sending an eternal message.

The original golden records were sent on the Voyager space probes in 1977 and the contents were compiled by Carl Sagan and his team. Tom Waes met with Carl’s wife and son to discuss the significance of the original Golden Record. He also met with Dr Jill Tarter from SETI, who is featured in the film Contact and is played by Jodie Foster.

In the series Tom Waes asks Jill Tarter if she can transmit his Golden Record, but she says “No” as SETI’s dishes are used to receive signals from space and not to transmit them. She does tell him she knows of places where signals can be transmitted from. In the next shot, Tom is approaching Goonhilly and he says that he thinks he has found the place!

Underneath the biggest dish Arthur, Tom interviews Des Prouse for some background and history on the BT Goonhilly site and finally meets with Chris. He says SentForever is his last hope and begs Chris to send the Golden Record. The series ends with a champagne toast below Arthur as Chris confirms that SentForever will transmit the message!

World Space Week

Our home - Earth

By Chris 

Did you know that October 4^th to 10^th is World Space Week? I didn’t. Apparently the United Nations General Assembly in 1999 declared October 4-10 annually as World Space Week. Today, the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs in Vienna provides the overall global coordination of World Space Week, under the guidance of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, and with the support of World Space Week Association, a non-government organization. 

I’m impressed that so many bodies are actively promoting the education and awareness of space across the globe. Mind you, we do often take our position here on Earth for granted. In a previous posting I spoke about the Pale Blue Dot. That view of Earth taken by a Voyager probe that shows our planet as a pale blue dot against the un-inhabitable vastness of outer space. Solitude. Precarious positioning. A living planet so remote from any other living body in space. 

I am particularly interested in the pale blue dot as I once worked for a mining company and have spent more time underground than the vast majority of people on this planet. And I mean deep underground – about a mile or more. So deep that the rock temperature is over 40 degrees Celsius and rock starts to flow over short periods of time due to the intense pressure. 

We regard Earth as our home, but in fact we can only live on the very surface of it. Some creatures do live in the ocean depths – but not humans. We are effectively trapped on the surface of a small round piece of rock, surrounded by a tenuous atmosphere floating in a loosely defined orbit in the vastness of space. Whew! 

But I’m glad – of course. As so many wondrous things happen and exist on our planet, and of course among the human race. I don’t believe for one moment that we are alone; there are other life forms out there, somewhere. Hopefully, at some time in the future, mankind may establish contact with them. It’s a long shot but I hope so.      

But by celebrating space week we are actually celebrating our potential neighbours, and hopefully educating people and broadening their awareness of what is all around us. And who knows who may be receiving the SentForever messages that are transmitted? Have a happy World Space Week.

SentForever’s Goonhilly earth station transmissions

Our messages into eternity may have no final destination as they travel forever, but they do have an interesting starting point – the BT Goonhilly earth station in Cornwall, UK.

Goonhilly was once the largest earth satellite station in the world, with more than 25 dishes in use and over 60 in total. Its first dish, called Arthur, was built in 1962 to link with Telstar, the world’s first active satellite. Arthur received the first ever live transatlantic television broadcasts from the United States via the Telstar satellite on July 11, 1962.

Ofcom has licensed SentForever to transmit our messages into deep space and our messages are transmitted in the Ku band in the 12 to 18 GHz wave band. At Goonhilly there is a visitor centre that explains all the activities that occur at the site. See http://www.goonhilly.bt.com for more information.

Our dish points roughly south east, and as we transmit our messages they pass 600 miles over the French Mediterranean in the blink of an eye. Within five hours the messages leave our solar system and travel at the speed of light for the rest of eternity.

All our messages are transmitted from the Goonhilly earth station, so whether you are sending a message for a newly born baby, proposing marriage in the most romantic way possible, sending a message of remembrance to honour someone’s memory, or simply expressing how much you love someone, your eternal message will commence its journey from Goonhilly.

Graduating into Eternity- a special SentForever message

I’m sure you have heard the saying “Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.” It’s true of course, but for most of us tomorrow tends to be pretty much like today which seems pretty much like yesterday which seems remarkably similar to the day before…. You get the pattern here?

However, if something changes quite significantly for you, then that can actually change tomorrow and also have a permanent effect on the rest of your life too. Graduating is one such event.

For many of us, graduating signaled the end of formal education and the start of a new life in paid employment. It’s curious that this stage of our lives seems to go on interminably and yet it only lasts some 40-odd years. But in those 40-odd years a lot happens.

Love, marriage, children, families and homes will all be formed. An individual may well make some significant achievement in their work that benefits mankind in some way. So upon graduation, who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Maybe that’s the time to wish somebody well for the future – that graduation marks an important transition point in life. To show how important that point is with SentForever, you can send a message of congratulations and celebration on the success of graduation, but also to send an eternal message to express all the hopes for success in every way in the future.

Because just as one day leads into the next, one person’s successes can be the starting point for another person to build on. What you do today can enable somebody else to do something better and different tomorrow – which then allows somebody else to do the same the next day. And so on into infinity. Just like a SentForever message.

Send somebody who is graduating a special SentForever eternal message, because what they are about to start doing from graduation day plus one will in some small way influence the future of mankind.

A Pale Blue Dot SentForever

Back in 1977, NASA launched two space probes to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system called Voyager 1 and 2. In 1990 NASA instructed Voyager 1 to look back at where it had come from and to take some images. One of them contained a picture of Earth taken from 4 billion miles away. It became known as the Pale Blue Dot picture, because that was all our Earth looked like in the vast expanse of space.

The astronomer and author Carl Sagan gave a talk that year where he said. “Look again at that dot. That’s here. 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.

Now, this is where I get blown away because the point at which Voyager took that picture is reached by SentForever’s messages in just under 6 hours after transmission.

Voyager 1 has been traveling for almost 31 years and yet a message transmitted by SentForever will overtake that probe in just 15 hours. That’s because SentForever radio wave transmissions travel at the speed of light.

For me, this really puts our delicate existence in the universe into context. When you consider the miracle that is what we call “our everyday life” is us just floating in a vast cosmos of nothingness – why on earth would we waste our time arguing and fighting when we should be appreciating all the amazing things that we have?

What are your thoughts on this?