Hatching a new dimension for global space travel

In the annals of exploration, the achievements of the two Voyager spacecraft are unprecedented. The journeys of Columbus and Magellan spanned a tens of thousands of miles on the watery surface of one small world. Voyagers 1 and 2 have traveled billions of miles through the ocean of space, exploring dozens of new worlds along the way and revolutionizing our knowledge of the solar system in which we live. And as a gift of the brilliant mission design, these robot ships are no longer bound by the Sun's gravity. They have passed the outermost planets and are on their way to the cold, dark near-vacuum that constitutes interstellar space. Nothing can stop them. Their radio transmitters are unlikely to work beyond the year 2020. Thereafter, they will wander silently and forever in the realm of the stars.

Who knows who's out there? Perhaps the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy is populated by desolate, wasteland worlds circling a hundred billion stars. Or maybe the Galaxy is rich in life forms and intelligence and technology much further beyond our reach than the Voyagers are of Columbus and Magellan have travelled. Someday - maybe millions of years in the future - one of these ghostly, derelict ships may be detected and captured by the representatives of some devastatingly advanced interstellar culture. They will wonder about the shipbuilders.

If you could send a long message to such extraterrestrial beings - words, pictures, sounds, and music - what would you say? How would you describe us? What would you leave out? Could you communicate intelligibly to very different beings with a wholly independent evolution? In 1977, at NASA's behest, a few of us had a remarkable opportunity to attempt such a (one-way) communication. Frank Drake suggested not a plaque, but a phonograph record. As described in the book, Murmurs of Earth, we designed and prepared the record to carry a rich message to the stars - 116 pictures and diagrams about our global civilization and our species, greetings, samples of the world's great music, the brain waves of a young woman in love and much else.

The Voyager mission has already become the stuff of myth, the premise for many works of science fiction. Brief excerpts from the Voyager record have been heard in films, television and radio. But the record itself has never before been available to the public, because of corporate rivalries and copyright restrictions. Warner New Media has broken through the logjam. Those of us who created the interstellar record - well-aware that different people would have made different selections - are delighted to help bring this message to you, essentially complete, as carried by Voyager. This is what the extraterrestrials will learn about us, should the spacecraft - now the fastest and farthest machines ever launched by the human species - one day encounter someone else in the depths of space.

A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we've ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents are changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyager record will still speak for us.

Carl Sagan -  (Sagan, 2009)

In 1977, NASA sent two spacecraft into space with one phonograph attached to the side which contained a message from earth, ever since then we have been fascinated with space travel and exploration and the notion that one day we my get to meet our inter-galactic neighbours.

We have come a long way since the seventies, but still, human long-term space travel with today’s technology is impossible due to our biological and technical constraints, but what about our digital selves? We can change our way of thinking and travel, and explore the cosmos using the digital versions of us. This will be a new dimension for human space travel driven by our product; it will provide us with the ultimate vehicle to meet our needs for symbolic immortality, that is, the human hope for the future immortality of our philosophy, our deeds, and our individual and shared memories – this is legacy.

Someday - maybe millions of years in the future - one of these ghostly, derelict ships (Voyager) may be detected and captured by the representatives of some devastatingly advanced interstellar culture. They will wonder about the shipbuilders. Now they will be able to see, listen, understand and possibly touch the shipbuilders – us.

Space Egg aims to provide the ultimate gift and travel experience by creating spacecraft designed for our digital selves to travel through and explore the infinite cosmos; a product and service that also provides a comforting solution to an enduring human condition; a condition that drives our need for symbolic (and biological) immortality.

Space Egg will be a new entrant to several different marketplaces, these include:

The unique/experiential/personalised gift market – Worth around £1 billion  (Rigby, 2015)

Cryogenics market – Worth around £500 million  (Alcor, 2016)

Digital travel market (travel for our digital selves) – as yet undeveloped

The Virtual Reality and Omni-channel retail market  - £108 billion by 2021 (TechCrunch)

We will be launching Space Egg flight vehicles into inter-stellar space. Each craft will carry over 60,000 digital passengers in economy class, who in turn will be carrying anything from videos, music, pictures, and even their electronic sequenced DNA files.

Business and Premium Plus class passengers will be offered the opportunity to carry on actual biological matter, for possible future DNA extraction by our inter-galactic neighbors, or even our future post-human selves.

Interested in early stage investment? Get in touch - Contact@spaceegg.com