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.

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.

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.

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.

Send your DNA into Eternity

Is it possible to teleport myself somewhere else? Well, perhaps it is in an unusual kind of way.

I came across a UK based company called DNA Art www.dna-art.co.uk who offer you the chance to own a unique representation of yourself or loved one, using DNA. You send them a sample of your DNA (which you obtain with a swab from your cheek) and they analyse it and convert it into a piece of art that you can hang on your wall.

Now I like this idea as it’s art that you can really relate to, it looks really cool, and it doesn’t get much more personal than this.

At SentForever, we are sending people’s messages of love into deep space where they travel for the rest of eternity. What if we sent a digital representation of your DNA into deep space too? Could you at some time in the future be recreated from this DNA map?

I know they don’t have the technology to recreate someone from a map of their DNA right now, but I’m pretty confident that they will have this capability in the not too distant future.

Now a gloomy bit. Did you know that the sun can’t keep shining forever? It will eventually burn up all the hydrogen and helium it uses to shine and will expand to become what is known as a red giant star. It will grow so large that it will consume the Earth and destroy every last trace of mankind and all life forms.

This won’t happen for several hundred million years, so there’s no need to panic, but imagine if the only re-constructible record of mankind was the SentForever DNA maps that people had transmitted into deep space many years earlier.

Maybe you want to use SentForever to transmit your DNA into the future – or perhaps you want to do something a little more down-to-earth by sending a special message that will last forever. It’s your choice.

The most romantic gift on the Internet

Someone once posed the question “How often should you tell your partner you love them?” There were many of the usual responses such as Valentine’s Day, every day when you wake up, wedding anniversaries etc; but one tongue-in-cheek answer was “Only once. I told my wife I loved her the day we got married and I said that if that ever changed I’d let her know!” I presume the guy was just joking…but then again maybe not.

When we were developing the SentForever business some time ago, I was intrigued by the thought of a really unusual Valentine gift for somebody. There is so much that can be done in the real world, but my line of thought moved into asking what is the most romantic gift on the Internet?

Obviously love had to be part of it, but what could you do with this love? The most romantic thing we could think of was making it last forever – or at least the words of love. And that became one of the original aims of SentForever. How can we allow people to send love messages that last forever?

Sending a Valentine message into eternity is quite an unusual gift, but shouldn’t romantic messages and other unique messages of love be sent for other occasions too? And what better occasion to tell someone you love them than right now! Maybe we shouldn’t be waiting for once a year occasions such as Valentines Day, birthdays and wedding anniversaries.

Why not tell someone you love them now. You don’t have to do it with SentForever; you can just phone them or walk into the next room and speak to them. However, if you did want to send the most romantic gift on the Internet…..well you know where to go www.sentforever.com

Let us know what you would send into eternity as the most romantic gift and if we are able to do it, we’ll do it for you for free. Maybe you’ll be the first person on Earth (and in the Universe) to do something unique!

By Chris Thomason

What’s so special about Eternity?

I think Eternity is a really interesting subject. It has a clearly defined starting point, which is right now – but no end point. It’s like flicking a light switch to turn a light on, which then disappears so you can never turn it off again. It takes so little effort.

And that’s what’s really weird about eternity, as you’d think that it takes an incredible amount of effort to make something last forever – but no, it’s really quite easy sometimes.

When you tell someone you will love them forever by sending a greeting card, the mere fact that the card will probably get thrown away or lost after a short time doesn’t align itself with the principle of forever, does it? However, going to the effort of sending a special message into deep space where it really will last forever, may be more relevant.

It is also a most unusual gift too. The promotions manager of a leading daily newspaper reviews lots of unusual gift ideas and upon trying out our special message service declared “This is so cool” and promptly ran a promotion for all their readers.

Eternity is associated with time but also with distance too. When you send a message with SentForever, the radio waves used to transmit your special message keep travelling forever. They do get weaker over time but they never ever stop. Radio waves also travel at the speed of light in space, so your unique gift to somebody special will actually be travelling at 671 million miles per hour!

So, by sending someone a personalized message into deep space with SentForever, you’ll be sending a unique gift that goes at the speed of light and that will continue to travel forever! That’s a special gift to someone that is really out there…. literally!

What do you think about regarding eternity, and what would you send into eternity if you had the chance?
By Chris Thomason