Poll of the Day > will we be able to have internet in space?

(+) Yeah! (+)

like when we have colonies all over the solar system do you think there will be a solar system internet that's all connected? or is that impossible? could someone on Mars skype with a person in a orbiting station at Jupiter? will Pluto have really bad lag in online games?

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No reason why not, though the lag would be pretty sick at first with current technology. We use satalites for internet here on earth, could do the same thing long distance, but....travel time of the signal would make the old 300 baud modems look fast.

That being said, large amounts of data could be transfered, it's just the lag getting there. So the 300 baud modem would take a minute to send a line of text. The solar system internet would probably take over 15 minutes to get to mars (not sure how long), but it could send large amounts of data all at once. So you could basically surf the web, or even stream movies, it would just have a serious delay.

As far as reaching the back of mars (point facing away from us etc), and/or dealing with rotation etc, you would need multiple satalites around mars (and of course earth) to bounce the signal off so every spot is reachable.

We could do it with our tech now though.
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we have internet access in space already

the latency is ass though
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Zikten posted...

like when we have colonies all over the solar system do you think there will be a solar system internet that's all connected?

we'd lose the monolithic nature of the current internet. you'd end up with multiple internet hubs. there'd be earthnet, marsnet, lunanet, etc., and depending on the location you'd have extreme lag between hubs (or worse without proper satellites in place you'd have blackouts to other hubs at certain times of day).

you could maybe have something like wikipedia replicated to marsnet. mars could then have a readonly version of wiki that's like 30 minutes behind the earth version or something. it would probably be tricky or impossible to have the local cached version writable, so to write to earthwiki from mars you'd need to suffer through the lagtime. it's possible new protocols would emerge to support browsing with such extreme delays.
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Sahuagin posted...

Zikten posted...

like when we have colonies all over the solar system do you think there will be a solar system internet that's all connected?

we'd lose the monolithic nature of the current internet. you'd end up with multiple internet hubs. there'd be earthnet, marsnet, lunanet, etc., and depending on the location you'd have extreme lag between hubs (or worse without proper satellites in place you'd have blackouts to other hubs at certain times of day).

you could maybe have something like wikipedia replicated to marsnet. mars could then have a readonly version of wiki that's like 30 minutes behind the earth version or something. it would probably be tricky or impossible to have the local cached version writable, so to write to earthwiki from mars you'd need to suffer through the lagtime. it's possible new protocols would emerge to support browsing with such extreme delays.

This is pretty much exactly what I was thinking. There could be a fixed update interval a few times a day to keep both internets up to date but real time interaction between internets would be impossible, unless we figure a way to transmit data faster than the speed of light.
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Zikten posted...

like when we have colonies all over the solar system do you think there will be a solar system internet that's all connected? or is that impossible?

This is already possible. NASA was able to download images from New Horizons after it passed Pluto. There is just the issues of bandwidth and communication time.

could someone on Mars skype with a person in a orbiting station at Jupiter?

No. Real time chat is impossible at those distances outside of some sort of technological advancement that may not even exist. For reference, it takes 4-24 minutes for a message to get transferred between Mars and Earth. The distance between Mars and Jupiter is tenfold that.

will Pluto have really bad lag in online games?

Once again real time communications aren't possible with long distances. When New Horizons went past Pluto it took ~9 hours to communicate with it from the Earth. When images were transmitted back to Earth the rate was ~2KB/s. You should be able to improve the transfer rate, but not the communication time. You're left with two options. You could have local servers and players would be confined to a player base of other players on Pluto. Or if that was infeasible, online gaming would be impossible.

It does get a bit complicated though since the distance between the planets and location of the planets varies greatly. You can calculate it, and they already do that to control space rovers etc on mars....but for online games etc, this could cause a drastic difference in lag.

Probably average something between 5 and 15 minutes delay. You could actually still play online games like that though, by using instances mainly. Instead of sending small amounts of data back and forth constantly, you send large amounts (which we can now handle) every 15 minutes.

This would restrict you to partying only with people who are on your planet at the time, but you could still play on the same server as people on earth, and interact/trade with them in town etc.
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