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.

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?