As part of the Day of the Dead festival on 2^nd November, SentForever are transmitting some memorials from www.muchloved.com into deep space so that they will exist for all eternity.

The Day of the Dead occurs on 2^nd November every year and this is also known as All Souls Day in many western religions. It originated in Central and Southern America many years ago but similar events are celebrated in many African and Asian countries as well as some European countries. It’s more of a joyous occasion as opposed to the more somber ways that western cultures observe memories of the deceased.

MuchLoved was set up by Jonathan Davies in 1995 after his younger brother suddenly died while at university at the age of 21. It is a registered charitable trust and allows people to create online memorials to individuals who have died. It’s a lovely site that allows you to create a memorial to the life of a lost loved one that can be kept private or can be made public so that others can view the memorial. 

SentForever will transmit a number of the MuchLoved online memorials on Sunday morning. Some of the memorials are for specific individuals while others are for more than one individual. One site id for little angels, children who passed on at a very early age. This is a particular special and moving memorial which celebrates the short time that these loved infants spent with their parents.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I recently blogged about the Pale Blue Dot picture and mankind’s tenuous existence on the solidified outer crust of a blob of molten rock which is hurtling through the void of space. Which kind of puts into perspective the fact that we are pretty damn fortunate to actually exist in the first place.

You know in the newspapers they have those announcements pages full of the notices of births, deaths and marriages that have occurred recently? Well, a good friend of SentForever gave birth to a baby boy on recently. So we decided to send her a special message. But what to say?

Obviously the new-born is an addition to her family and an addition to the local community, but who can say what this child is going to achieve in the future? Not just for himself, his family or the local community, but for all mankind. And the Universe?

This amazing little boy is actually a new born soul in the entire Universe and should be welcomed as such. In the whole of the Universe there is not another soul like him. And I’m sure that in some distant galaxy on some remote planet another being has been born (as we call it) too. Exactly what that being is, or looks like, I have no idea. But I don’t think this entire Universe was created just for us.

How that distant race celebrates the creation of another of their kind I can’t even imagine – but whoever or whatever you are – welcome to the Universe.

Back to our friend’s little boy. We transmitted a SentForever eternal message for him that welcomed him into the Universe and into the amazing world of which he is now part. I’m not going to tell you the full message as that was personal to him and his parents, but our friend told us the words were so emotional that it brought tears to their eyes.

Maybe we should celebrate the birth of every new-born baby by welcoming them into the Universe. After all, they are a part of it – and who knows, maybe a very significant part….