Patrick Tejedor
President of the Association PROGRAMME KEO
June 2011

Jean-Marc Philippe had this marvellous idea of inviting every inhabitant of our present day planet to write a message to our faraway descendants. They will receive these messages through a satellite which will have previously rotated around the earth during a few centuries or some thousands of years before returning and landing .

This is the KEO project.

To convert this dream into reality, a few steps are still to take : finding out how to finance the project, calling out manufacturers mastering the skills to be part of it, collecting messages amongst all peoples - those who have Internet and the other, those who know how to write and the other, those whose language can be written and the other - , manufacturing the KEO satellite and its highly invaluable payload, and launching it into space on the selected correct orbit.

This humanistic project requires motivated actors, ( individuals, companies, institutions, associations…), filled with the KEO spirit that Jean-Marc Philippe has successfully managed to infuse for years.

To-day Jean-Marc Philippe is no longer with us: he joined the stars in November 2008 after a hard struggle against illness. He left us his project which we will realize.

It is true that initial time limits have slipped away… But what can a few years mean in relation with the KEO horizon ? Thanks to these sliding dates, technologies will be able to keep on progressing and improving their capacity to better equip the satellite.

Once the financing has been completed, a project-team will be implemented to control the actions. Launching this project is taking a long time.Two or three years will be necessary to carry on manufacturing the satellite and especially collecting messages. The date for launching the satellite into space will depend upon the opportunities offered by launchers as regards the orbit.

That is why we are to-day announcing 2014 as an earlier launching date and the end of 2013 as deadline for collecting messages. But we do not cling to theses dates as long as initial steps have not set up yet..

Numerous contributions will be necessary too in order to disseminate the call for messages all over the world.

The KEO project is a humanistic project : it puts every human being on equal terms towards their distant future, it allows them to write a message which will be read one day by our descendants, beyond centuries, it prompts reflection on our human nature.

But its ambition does not involve only our far away descendants.

As soon as all messages are launched into space, they will become accessible to our contemporaries as they will be uploaded, anonymously, on Internet where they will give rise to cartographies by meanings and profiles. The purpose is to enable present day mankind to better know itself through this tremendous material consisting of millions of messages issued from all peoples of the earth., in order to initiate a global debate with the aim of building between us from now onwards a more human world

So of course time limits have slipped, but the project is more than ever topical . Numerous messages keep on arriving from all continents. Join them and sent this invitation to friends and family to think differently about ourselves.

Welcome aboard KEO !

Patrick Tejedor

President of the Association PROGRAMME KEO