Last week I made myself immortal. Yep, you read that correctly. I submitted my name to the list that will be aboard the NASA mission to Pluto, the Kuiper Belt and beyond named New Horizons, due for launch in early 2006. My name, along with a select few (hundred thousand), will be put on a disc and placed upon the spacecraft whose primary mission is to observe at close range the planet Pluto, it’s moon Charon and later, objects in the Kuiper belt. It will arrive at Pluto in 2015 and the Kuiper belt in 2020.

But what after that? Where will the craft go? Where in the boundless, unimaginable depths of the universe will my name end up? Well, like it’s famous predecessors, Voyagers 1 and 2 which have already left the Solar System, nothing much should change on the craft unless there is a nasty collision with an asteroid or errant star – but the chances of that happening are relatively small given the great distances between objects in space. Long after I have faded from existence, after mankind has ceased to be and the sun has consumed the inner planets of our little solar system, the chances are the spacecraft, by now long cold and dead, will still be spinning through interstellar space towards infinity – and my name will still be on it. The Earth and everything upon it created by the hand of man will be gone, the only lasting epitaph of humanity will be the little band of untouchable spacecraft sent out into the void by us, silently and eternally hurtling headlong past stars and nebulae. I think that’s as close to eternity as I can get.