Hello from SentForever to Hello from Earth. It’s great to see another opportunity for people to send mesages into space with the Hello from Earth site sending their message on 24th August 2009. 

They are transmitting a message towards a planet that orbits around the star Gliese 581 which will arrive there around December 2029. Even though deep space messages travel at the speed of light, their radio signal will need to cross 20.3 light-years (or 192 trillion kms) of interstellar space before reaching the planet.

It sounds like a long way, but Gliese is one of the 100 closest stars to Earth, making it a top target for sending and hopefully receiving a message within our lifetimes. Any response will need to travel the same way back, so unless Gliesans have improved communication technologies, the soonest we could hope to receive an answer would be in 42 years around 2051.

The message was created by Cosmos magazine to celebrate National Science Week in Australia which is an annual event now in its 12th year. It’s also supported by the Australian Government’s Department of Innovation. Industry, Science and Research. Good to see a government being on board with a project like this.

You may remember that in April 2009 SentForever transmitted a message from the people of Belgium called Hartelijke Groeten aan Iedereen (Warm Greetings to Everyone) which was the message created by a Belgian television show. We’ve sent a Hello from Earth message naturallyand we certainly wish them well with their transmission!

For some time now at SentForever, we’ve been talking about offering more choice in our cards (the carrier of the Certificate of Transmission), and we’ve spent considerable time looking at what’s on offer.

We have sourced an exceptional selection of letterpress greetings cards, produced by Blush Publishing. Our first card off the press is our Mother’s Day card which has been available on our website since 12^th March 2009.

Letterpress is a printing technique dating back some 500 years. The process involves inking the surface of movable type or blocks and pressing them onto a surface. Letterpress prints are crisper than modern litho prints because of its ‘impression’ into the paper, giving greater visual definition to the image.

Each card produced by Blush Publishing is hand fed into a vintage printing press, and printed onto 100% cotton papers. We are delighted with the quality of our Mother’s Day cards.

By the way, the cards are in good company – as the British Design Museum (one of the world’s leading museums for design), already stocks these letterpress greeting cards.

Over the next few months we will be adding more choice – so keep a look out. But why not send your mum a Mother’s Day card this year?

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.

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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