By Chris 

This post follows on from Stephanie’s recent post Remembering the Lost Babies a few weeks back. 

Some years ago I had the saddest dream about a baby. Usually I forget my dreams but that morning I remembered it and so I wrote it down. As you start to write a dream down, more and more details are remembered and the dream started to get longer and longer. I wanted to capture this dream in as few words as possible, so this is what I wrote: 

A young baby always knows if it is going to die that night. So when its parents put it to bed it cries and cries to tell them not to leave it alone as it is going to die – but of course the parents don’t understand what the baby is saying. That night the child dies, thinking that its parents didn’t love it enough to save it. 

Now I don’t believe this is true for a moment – it was just a dream I captured. A very moving dream. 

Parents who have lost an older child say that the important thing is to ensure that the child is remembered. That they existed on this earth and they did this, achieved that, and their lives are often captured in many different memories and photos over the years. 

However, when a baby passes on its very different. A baby isn’t really in a position to give the parents anything that is material – it’s usually the parents giving to the child – care, attention, toys, but above all else, love. 

There is a saying that we should live each day as if it were our last. Well perhaps every day we should love our children as if it were their last day – but in a positive sense of course. Let them really know how much they are cherished and loved. 

For the lost babies, this can be done too. In our hearts, our thoughts, our actions and our prayers. And maybe in a special way too by sending a message into eternity. Because, when the baby’s parents and near relatives pass on, how will that child be remembered in the future? 

By sending a message into eternity, that message will exist forever. Your love that is captured in that message will live forever, their memory will live forever. 

We can help ensure your lost baby is remembered forever. And for those babies that are alive today, well, love them just that little bit extra today. Take care.

New dwarf planet

Posted by Chris 

Two new planets were discovered this week – which I find really interesting. The first is actually only a dwarf planet about one-third the size of Pluto. It orbits about 50 times further away from the sun as our Earth. It’s egg shaped with two smaller bits orbiting it due to a collision at some time in its past, and has been named Haumea after the Hawaiian mythology goddess of childbirth and fertility. 

The second is a really big planet; about eight times the size of Jupiter and it orbits a distant star about 500 light years from Earth. It was discovered by three scientists from the University of Toronto. This planet is the first one that has ever actually been seen orbiting a star other than our own sun. Previously observed planets were either free-floating in space or were inferred from collected data. 

What I find especially interesting is the difference in distance from Earth. SentForever’s eternal messages are transmitted through space at the speed of light, which means that a message sent to the dwarf planet would reach it in just under seven hours while a message to the big planet would take 500 years to reach there. Quite a difference!   

But another interesting angle is that we are excited because we have just discovered them – even though they have quietly been “doing their thing” for several billion years. It’s a bit like meeting your life-partner or soul-mate. When you actually meet them you will realize they have been on Earth for many years going about their daily lives – it’s just that you only recently discovered them. If you were a planet or a person how do you actually “announce your existence?”   

What if you were to live your life and die – and nobody knew, or nobody remembered you? Maybe that means that you never really existed! I seem to be getting a bit philosophical but I’m thinking about making sure that you are remembered. I’m thinking about immortality – ensuring that you are recognized and remembered for the rest of time.

The messages that SentForever transmit continue to travel across the Universe for the rest of eternity – so isn’t this making you immortal? I’m thinking interesting thoughts here. I’ll come back to this in a blog post the very near future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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