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!

First Day at School card

First day at school

Last week I was out shopping and noticed some ‘first day at school’ greetings cards in a number of greetings cards shop windows. My immediate thought was I can’t bear another hallmark occasions being shoved down our throats. 

But then a few nights ago I was ironing the last of the name tags onto my son’s school clothes I was suddenly quite emotional about the fact that he was starting school for the first time, and that it had all come round far too quickly. It seemed like just the other day we were returning from hospital with a newborn bundle. 

It suddenly came to me that this occasion i.e. ‘starting school for the first time’ was one of those significant moments in life. 

Sure learning has been happening since the day he was born – but this is the start of a structured approach to educating him. So I went online to www.SentForever.com and sent him a wish from his Dad and me on this very special occasion of him starting school for the first time. I wanted my words to be quite profound and so I searched the internet looking for appropriate quotes on education and came across the following site http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/edquotes.html. The inspirational quote I chose was ‘The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth. – J. F. Kennedy’ and then I added my own sentiments. The end result is something that I think demonstrates the signifcance of the day plus our emotional intent for him. 

On the morning of his first day, I presented the envelope to him at breakfast, and he was delighted that something has arrived in the mail for him on his big day. He tore the envelope open and then shrieked ‘look it’s a satellite dish’ when he saw the card. I read the message to him which is on the Certificate of Transmission. I don’t think the words made the impression I wanted it to. Certainly not now (in his defence he is only 4 years old). But in years to come when he is older he can enter his unique tracking number and see the distance his personal message has travelled through the universe, and hopefully reflect on why I choose the words I did, and what it could mean for his future. 

I’d like to think this message which has been sent out into eternity is something he will look at when he starts high school and hopefully university. I hope he finds it inspiring.

Top baby names in the UK

Want to know what the top baby names in the UK were last year? Well, I found these statistics quite interesting. The top ten names for boys in 2007 were: Jack, Thomas, Oliver, Joshua, Harry, Charlie, Daniel, William, James and Alfie. Interestingly, Mohammed came in at number 17.

For girls, the top ten names were Grace, Ruby, Olivia, Emily, Jessica, Sophie, Chloe, Lily, Ella and Amelia

Interestingly, in 1934 in the UK, the top five boy’s names were John, Peter, William, Brian and David, while the top girl’s names for the same year were Margaret, Jean, Mary, Joan and Patricia.

There were 669,000 babies born in the UK in 2006 while 502,000 died.

If you are having a baby and have decided upon the name, then why not send a message into eternity that announces the arrival of this very special person to the rest of the Universe. After all, your child will become a national citizen of the country of birth, but also in the bigger scheme of things your child will be part of the Universe.

So why not send your child’s name and birth details into eternity with a message from SentForever that will quite literally be sent forever.

Eternal numbers

Numbers have always fascinated me, but some of the numbers involved in a SentForever message transmission are quite amazing.

Our eternal messages are transmitted from BT’s satellite earth station in Cornwall UK and our dish points in a South Easterly direction. In the blink of an eye the messages are passing 550 miles (about 880 kilometres) above the French Mediterranean coast, as they start their eternal journey. In space, radio waves travel at the speed of light, which equates to 670 million miles per hour (about 1.07 billion kilometers per hour).

The nearest star to Earth other than our own sun is Alpha Centauri, and it would take our messages 4.2 years to reach there if we transmitted in that direction. So you can get a feel for how far the messages go, check these numbers out:

• In a day your message travels 16,070,000,000 miles,

• In a week your message travels 112,000,000,000 miles,

• In a month your message travels 482,000,000,000 miles,

By the time the one-year anniversary of your message being sent occurs, your message will have travelled 5.9 trillion miles. And that’s only the first year of your message’s eternal journey.

For an unusual gift for somebody, or if you want to send somebody special a very personal message, then SentForever can help you to do something really different. Send them a message into eternity – it’s the most unusual way to say something special.

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.

The gift that lasts forever

I was recently at a friend’s house who had just had a birthday. The room was strewn with cards, wrapping paper and a selection of presents. What do you think of the gifts, I asked, to which the reply was a so-so waving of the hand. She later said that she would probably “recycle” most of the presents and give them back as gifts to other people. And hasn’t that happened to us all?

Not only is it the extraordinarily non-environmentally friendly wastage of paper, cards and packaging, but it’s the fact that most of the gifts will be consumed or disposed of in a short space of time. This is where a SentForever personal message really stands out.

The Certificate of Transmission of the message is mounted in an elegant presentation card and delivered in a very stylish envelope. It serves as both the card and the gift and does not require any wrapping paper. It also contains your own very personal message as opposed to an off-the-shelf verse – a message that will exist for the rest of eternity.

Even if the message is sent as a card, our research shows that the majority of people who receive their message perceive it more as a gift and not as a card.

So if you want to send someone special a very unusual gift, then a SentForever message is perfect for you.

My Top Three Message Occasions

Why would someone want to send a message into eternity? Well, here are my top three reasons for sending an eternal message:

1. Remembrance – when you feel the need to talk to someone dear to you who has passed on. When you have to write something down, it helps to clarify your thoughts. Some people talk to their dear ones through prayer, which generally isn’t just a rambling monologue but a structured and purposeful way of communicating. If you are a more spiritual person and want to send something special that will travel through the heavens for the rest of eternity and that you feel will be close to your lost one, that’s a wonderful reason.

2. Birth – when a child is born, our natural association may be that it is a new child for its parents. However, if you think about it differently, a child being born is actually a much bigger miracle, as it is the moment when a new soul (or spirit) enters the Universe. Maybe this new child will do something really amazing in its lifetime that will benefit the whole of mankind. Who knows? But a SentForever birth message welcoming this new baby into our Earth, into our lives, and into the Universe as a whole is a very special way to celebrate this occasion.

3. Marriage – as our vows often refer to the relationship lasting forever. Why not transmit your wedding vows into eternity to celebrate this special day? It’s a fact that a large percentage of marriages do fail. But by thinking back to the magic and special feelings that existed on the wedding day, and also to the fact that those wedding vows that were said are travelling through the Universe for all eternity (and that they can never be recalled), would this help the couple to remember the feelings when they got married in the first place?

What are your top reasons for sending a message? Let me know and we may be able to make it happen for you.

Speaking of Azimuths and Elevations

So if I send a message with SentForever, which direction does my message travel in? Good question.

We use a communications satellite dish based at BT’s Goonhilly earth satellite station in Cornwall UK. Now, communications satellite dishes are different from the radio telescope dishes used by the radio astronomers (such as the big dish at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire).

The astronomers are trying to listen to distant signals from far away stars – just like Jodie Foster in the film Contact. Because the Earth rotates, they have to keep the dish moving slightly to ensure that it stays on target. Obviously, they can only receive signals when the source is visible to the dish. They can’t receive signals when the source is below the horizon for example. This slow movement is called tracking.

Communications dishes don’t need to track a distant object as they are normally pointing at a fixed point in the sky to transmit or receive signals from a satellite in orbit. These dishes are capable of moving as sometimes they are repositioned to look at a different satellite in a different part of the sky. But they aren’t continuously tracking – they are effectively stationary.

When you send a Premium message with SentForever, you receive a Certificate of Transmission which includes the azimuth and elevation of your messages transmission. The azimuth is the compass direction and the azimuth setting of the SentForever dish means we are transmitting approximately South East out of Cornwall over France and the Mediterranean.

The elevation is the angle above the horizon, and the SentForever dish transmits at am elevation of 20.7 degrees above the horizon.

So that’s the direction of the message – but what’s the destination? Answer – eternity, as your message travels forever!

Contact – the movie- searching for radio transmissions

Did you see the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster – made back in 1997? It’s based on Carl Sagan’s novel and it’s one of our favourite movies here at SentForever.

It’s based around the story of an astronomer who is searching for radio transmissions from other civilizations in deep space. Despite deep scepticism from people involved in the more traditional fields of science and astronomy, she perseveres and eventually finds one of these transmissions. The rest of the film follows the decoding of the transmission and how they go about following its instructions.

I was interviewed on BBC radio recently and was asked if anybody will ever receive the SentForever messages that are transmitted. It was a good question which I had to answer in two parts.

First of all – I don’t know if it will ever be received. Our transmissions go out in a narrow beam into one particular part of space ay any one time so on one hand the chances are slim. However, the transmission will last forever even though it gets weaker and weaker over time. So, on the other hand that boosts the chance of a message being received.

The other important element is that SentForever’s messages aren’t intended to be received. They are intended as eternal commitments and messages that people just want to send – and then to tell someone about what they have said. It’s called Unrequited Love.

So, if you’ve sent a SentForever message of unrequited love to someone here on Earth, then I hope they enjoyed receiving it. As to whether someone else out in the Universe will receive it – well, my answer comes in two parts….

If you sent a SentForever message, do you think it will be received? Let us know.

Everyday and once in a lifetime

I was thinking about things that we only intend to do once in our lifetime. Going to an interesting distant country that we like means we often go back there again. So it’s not about distance or places. With people, we tend to meet them regularly. So I started thinking about events and occasions.

Children – no we often have more than one. Death, well yes, that only happens once – but generally it isn’t in our best interest to die. Marriage – now that could be one of the few things that we imagine we will only do once (well at the time anyway).

If a marriage is such a special once-in-a-lifetime event then I was thinking how that occasion or special moment could be made to last forever. After all, in a Christian wedding, there is much ceremony around the “for ever and ever” aspect of getting married.

I made a list of the highlights of getting married and thought that this would make a wonderful service for SentForever to offer. Here are the things I thought of:

- making a proposal of marriage. What did you say to propose and what was the first photo you took of yourselves when you were “officially engaged” as a couple?

- what were your wedding vows that you exchanged at your wedding?

- a copy of your marriage certificate

- a significant part or reading of your marriage ceremony

- a photograph of you and your guests on the big day

- your special song

I think that soon after the wedding, if SentForever were to transmit all these items into eternity for you, it would be something that could never be recalled or cancelled. And hopefully that’s just what your marriage should be – something that will last forever.

SentForever would love to hear from you if you are getting married soon as we’d like to offer a limited number of these complimentary transmissions. All we’d ask is that you let us know what you thought of the service as part of our market research. Just contact us through our website if you are interested.