We can’t even get back to the moon right now, so maybe I’m worrying about this prematurely, but how will the internet work on a Mars colony? Considering current place in orbits, Mars can be anywhere from four to twenty light minutes away from Earth. That means if you’re on Mars and sent a request to see the webpage IMAO, it would take that many minutes for the server it’s on to get the request and that many minutes again to send the data back to you. That means it would take from eight to forty minutes to pull up IMAO — three times slower than normal!
Now, things like twitter and e-mail will work fine — there will just be a big delay and we’ll probably want to mark things so you know if you’re communicating with Mars and can expect a delayed response. And obviously, things like Skype and playing Call of Duty between Mars and Earth just aren’t going to happen. But we’re going to need the web and some quick way around the back and forth communication to bring up a webpage. I guess we’ll need to keep a cache of the web locally on Mars that’s constantly being updated from what’s on Earth, and then people on Mars will make their requests to those servers. The problem will be when info gets altered about something on both Mars and Earth, so we’ll need some good automated merge algorithms.
So, I don’t know when we’re going to start living on Mars, but we really should try to hammer out a solution to the internet problem before we get there. Last thing we want is to all get on Mars and be like, “Wait a second… we don’t have internet!” I’m just sketching out a few ideas on the problems we’ll have, but I can work on the solutions more fully as soon as someone in the government sends me millions of dollars (and don’t act like you don’t have millions to throw around pointlessly).
Frank, Frank, Frank!!! When you go to this government to don’t ask for a pittance. They wipe their a$$es with million dollar bills. You go to them in terms they understand. Trillions of $ my boy! I think we need laser beams to send IMAO between Mars and Earth. Probably one of those pocket lasers you use to point at white boards and airplanes that are landing would work out fine! Then your server would need a laser catcher’s mitt attached to get the signal and it would need to be plugged into the server. Translating laser into IP will be difficult but when you have trillions to throw around, some dweeb can probably be enticed from his basement where he writes internet dating ads all day…
Not once – not once! – in this article did you mention “Science! demands” or “Science!” says we must” needlessly spend billions of dollars on this, uh, “problem.”
Frank, don’t you know how things work nowadays?
Uh oh, are you talking about replication?
In that case, GUIDs will be useless since we’ve gone beyond Global.
To keep my code Mars compliant, I’m going to start using SSUIDs (Solar System Unique IDentifiers)
But then again, once we go beyond the solar system, I’ll need to use GUIDs again (Galaxy Unique IDentifiers), but how will we delineate the old ‘Global’ GUIDs from the “Galaxy’ GUIDs.
Probably best to jump straight to UUIDs (Universally Unique IDentifiers). How many bytes each do you think those will consume?
Twenty minutes! Your erection will have subsided before the pop up ad covering the streaming video even starts!
Isn’t it bad enough that we’re letting the Chinese and the Russians use our Internets, now you want to let the Martians use it too?
Ghengis: ColdFusion, for one example, already uses UUIDs. They’re just like GUIDs except they’re missing the last dash. Really.
Maybe RUIDs (Really Unique IDentifiers) are needed.
Basil is right! If we let those danged Martians use our internet, they may want to have neutrality so that they are sure to get choice bandwidth so that we can’t sell it to paying customers. Then Martians will start demanding free internet, and health care, and want to use our swimming pools. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want some green little Martian staring at me in my Speedo.
I figure by the time we colonize Mars the “internets” will be quite different, it may even be something completely different. I’m sure Science! will discover sub-space communications like on Star Trek eliminating the delay of 8 to 40 minutes to load IMAO, it will be called the Subspacenets or The Used To Be Called Internet Now It’s Faster Than Light-net or some other Science! inspired silly name. By the way, IMAO will stand for I’m Martian And Original or Is Mars Angry, Oswald?
Mars? Hell, I work in Peru and I get a 403 Error if I try to access IMAO without first routing the request through my US-based home office. Solve that one, and then I’ll worry about your Mars problems.
We can’t claim to have won the future without good martian internets.
Admit it, Frank. You’re just worried about whether there will be porn on Mars.
Frank, I’m pretty certain IPv4 and IPv6 won’t cut it in the solar system. Therefore! WE need IPv8 and we need it now to be ready! To heck with IPv6, except everyone needs to convert to it first and then upgrade to IPv8 but keep backwards compatibility to IPv4 and IPv6 just in case. I talked to Al Gore on this, and trust him, if we don’t do IPv8 immediately, we run the risk of increasing global warming and ice ages!!! Oh, also, the Secretary General of The United Nations requires a Solar System Internet KILL SWITCH, mainly for protection from alien attacks. (But President Obama doesn’t get one, something about his ugly ears….)
The Solar System Internet… when “Billions and Billions” just won’t cut it. (And neither will “Trillions and Trillions.”)
It seems as though it should be possible to use some kind of quantum entanglement business to send information faster than light, unless I’m behind on the latest Science!
If it works, then the Greater Space Internet will obviously be called the Q-Net, and John deLancie will obviously be doing the commercials for it.
The central issue is, assuming we do wrangle a pair (or what would likely be more useful, several bazillion pairs) of entangled particles into separate boxes, how much bandwidth can they handle for how long before the entanglement is broken or deteriorates or something? How that works is likely to determine how expensive it will be in the long run.
See this is where Star Trek:TNG comes in handy. You just need a tachyon beam instead of light beam. Then you can have information from earth before it happens. Or something like that.
“That means it would take from eight to forty minutes to pull up IMAO — three times slower than normal!”
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
Nah. The way I see it, the space dudes are way ahead of us – Flight of the Navigator showed me that much. You’ll be fine with your internet connection.
I wish I were smart enough to figure out how to put my own picture up for when I post.
You guys are using the Internet? I get IMAO via my tinfoil hat. It’s unaffected by cosmic distances and sunspot activity.
@Carolyn: You can make your own personal hoo-ha, picture or otherwise, at gravatar.com
Read that subatomic particles brought into proximity can develop “affinity.” That means that if one changes the direction it is spinning, the other will do likewise at the exact same instant, regardless of distance, no matter how great. This means, if I am not mistaken, that faster than light communication IS, in fact, possible. The only impediment is in figuring out how to harness those particles and utilize the information they are passing in a coherent way. I suspect it will be binary, i.e. this one is spinning up, that one down, etc. but there are other possibilities, just a bit more complex.
Orson Scott Card postulated something called “philotic connections” in Ender’s Game, without really defining a method or means for them to work. These particles could the means, we just need to develop the method.
@Genghis: Science! points to one flaw in your design. There are lots of universes all over the place in strings. We’d be screwed if one of our UUID’s collided with its identical UUID from a parallel universe. Adding an additional bit, the SGID (or “Spock Goatee Identifier”), should prevent this.
There actually is something called Interplanetary Internet Protocol. The basic idea is that if you are trying to get a signal from point A to point B, and you don’t have a direct route, you could send it to a third point in between that would then forward the message. This is being done manually with signals to the Mars surface probes (which is to say, these days, Opportunity), and the orbiters. The Phoenix lander didn’t have an antenna that could reach Earth (other than a basic beacon to let us know if it crashed) – it used this “bent pipe” method for all communications.
yeah Kent at 21 – cyber pinball for Mars only much discourse and disharmony amongst earthians for control of routed beams so special earthships need to be invented to bypass evil chargers. Like that is first the order great powerful magnificent space machines that protect cyber beams happy pinballing to Mars
Internet on Mars? I didn’t know we had settled there yet. Had to skip the Lunar colony because of that whole Nuke the Moon issue
But Captain Kirk was able to send and transmit data in real time from 100’s of light years away! Nay, I say it is possible or the whole Star Trek thing turns into one giant fantasy and we all know that it is like super real! We just need for more and better science through more $’s from you lousy cheap a$$ penny pinchers who can’t see past the end of your noses! You need to look into the future…way into the future and then pony up the cash!
I’ve long wondered if the speed of light really is the universal speed limit…or is that just where today’s math breaks down?
We’ve got that (c² – v²) in the denominator, and divide-by-0 stuff. But Newton thought that his equations were good, too.
Telephone Wires! That’s the answer! We build about a million Telephone Poles between here and Mars and wire them for the internet. Problem solved. Next. Science!
When going to Mars
It’s important to pack light,
You can’t bring it all…
T Mobile 4G,
Or maybe just the Spokes-Girl?
I choose the latter.
Does the internet let Martians download Japanese hand porn anime?
In order to keep the delay as short as possible, I think we should permanently lock Mars into an orbit that keeps it in the same relative spot to earth. If our current orbit is good enough for us, it’s good enough for Mars too!