Building the Interplanetary Internet 334
sighted writes "Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, now a Google VP, is leading a NASA effort to create a permanent network link to Mars within the next two years. As Cerf outlined in a recent talk, the 'InterPlaNet' protocol is designed to handle the delay caused by interplanetary distances. A signal traveling between the Earth and Mars can take up to 20 minutes."
I guess astronauts..... (Score:3, Funny)
Screw that (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Screw that (Score:5, Funny)
It's worth the wait, dude, trust me. If you like what you see in Tokyo or Bangkok, just wait until you see the freaky shit out of Mars.
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Re:Screw that (Score:4, Informative)
Ok, I know I get an A for effort and an F for sense of humor, but I wanted to cover the issue. sue me.
From Ask Slashdot 2027 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:From Ask Slashdot 2027 (Score:5, Funny)
Fuck online... come on down to Lab 6 and play for real!
-Andrew Hackman
Union Aerospace Corporation
ob Sealab 2021 (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:From Ask Slashdot 2027 (Score:4, Funny)
What you need is a good old fashioned tachon transmitter/reciever. They send signals faster than light, and best of all, the faster the signal, the lower the energy required.
Re:problem is, you keep getting anoying responses (Score:2)
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You'll need the nVidia 88800000 GPU card.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:From Ask Slashdot 2027 (Score:5, Funny)
Give it a try it only needs 640 terabytes of ram.
Re:From Ask Slashdot 2027 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:From Ask Slashdot 2027 (Score:4, Funny)
"A spooky action has occurred. Cancel or allow?"
How exactly is this news? (Score:2, Redundant)
Open protocol (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Open protocol (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:How exactly is this news? (Score:4, Informative)
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Your talking about maybe a dozen total communication relays, and then every probe sent to mars would only need to be able to reach orbit saving lot's of power for other tools and test equipment.
Charge the ESA, russia, or anyone else a bit of cash for relay use, and help pay for it.
Just hope they
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I like pretty pictures and diagrams. So, I found a good presentation [spaceref.com] by Cerf back in 2000 which outlined these challenges and why [spaceref.com] we need the IPN.
Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
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Well, isn't it always about the last mile?
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Except here we're talking about the last 2.7 AUs of conjunction.
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Right!!! If NASA pulls this off, then I can take that argument to my local phone company. I'll convince them that if NASA can connect a line like that, then the phone company should have no problem getting DSL or FIOS lines to me.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes sense to be looking and working towards the future, this sounds like an interesting project.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Informative)
I live within a half mile of one of the most expensive schools in my state (Franklin & Marshall). Almost all of the kids drive brand new cars, many of them luxury cars. They're able to pay for high speed broadband and would spring for 10Mbps symmetrical connections even if they cost $100/month, just because Mommy and Daddy would pay for it. Because of the population density, a few last-mile (more like last-fifteen-feet) runs would make whoever did it tons of money.
But they don't. Why? Because the only two carriers in the city (Comcast and Verizon) are already making tons of money giving sub-par service, and there's no other competition to force them to innovate thanks to our wonderful state government. I can't even get Embarq because Verizon has the CO locked down, and Embarq isn't my "local carrier."
If the state government got rid of the monopolies on cable and phone lines, we'd see some movement.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazing isn't it. As a UK citizen I used to think that America was this democratic utopia of free trade, where healthy competition between companies resulted in the best deal for customers anywhere. I mean, your prices are so much lower than ours, so it must work right?
I remember first becoming aware that things weren't quite right when (several years ago) I read about the dysfunctional state of the cell phone network across the USA, and the fact that I could send SMS messages to come people, but not to others because of interoperability's between network vendors. Then I learned about the draconian restrictions the cell phone networks place on their customers, like multi-year tie in clauses and crippled phone functionality.
But the scales really got knocked from my eyes when the California blackouts happened in 2000, caused by Enron's manipulative energy trading. People died because of that. What a mess!
Now I read about this. What went wrong guys? Capitalism was never supposed to be as f*cked up as this.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism isn't supposed to be anything except profitable. It's not supposed to provide services well. It's not supposed to interoperate well. It's not even supposed to keep people alive. It is supposed to maximize profits by any means necessary.
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What went wrong guys? Capitalism was never supposed to be as f*cked up as this.
slashdot wisdom [google.com]
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to that the class of nations run by people who find it convenient to keep the populace ignorant (China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, etc), and you have a practically insurmountable problem, no matter how much money is diverted from NASA to broadband connections for the unconnected.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Funny)
That's why no work is getting done in my office right now.
It's easier (Score:2)
It's called picking the low-hanging fruit. There's no Verizon on Mars so putting in a good Internet connection should be pretty easy.
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Yes, ping times for games might be crappy, but downloads are quite speedy once you get going (though "chatty" stuff with lots of small messages like Peer-to-Peer also can suck.)
Again, it's economics. I suppose you'll be able to find political hack whiners claiming $80 a month is a "huge ripoff, the gubmint must get involved"; nevermind the investments made to bri
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Have you ever actually used one? Everybody I know who has one (dozens of people) hate it. VPN is unusable, web surfing hurts (try doing AJAX with 3-6 second response times) and ssh is break-out-the-modem time. As you mention, games are unplayable.
The once case you do cite, downloads, is OK, though a bit slow.
Oh, and the entire network can crash for hours to day
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http://www.neopets.com/~Fruzia [neopets.com]
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-avoiding war areas.
-securing clean food and water supply.
-having access to decent medical services and education.
-getting a job that pays more than the poverty level.
then even slow internet is a luxury that comes way behind a decent home, clothes, meat, a vehicule, electricity, a TV...
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Doom Server (Score:2)
While the latency would make it almost impossible, I would love to play a game of Doom on a Martian server.
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Latency Bright Side (Score:2)
According to google: (2 * 6 000 kilometers) / the speed of light = 40.0276914 milliseconds
Which is better than what i get playing with people in the US from Israel.
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Ping (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ping (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry (Score:3, Interesting)
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Deja vu (Score:2)
Re:Ping (Score:5, Interesting)
ping marsbase.com.mars.sol
When I saw the
Steve.
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Re:Ping (Score:5, Interesting)
Now it's really future-proof
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When I saw the
so will that mean all earth based websites will need earth.sol tacked on at the end? I think that NASA needs to come up with an IP spec that includes the computers GPS location. Um, currently GPS as far as I know just applies to Earth. NASA need to come up with a scheme of mapping the entire solar system for gps addresses.
If I'm pinging myspaceprobe.org.asteriodbe
Interplanetary Spam (Score:2)
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So P2P now means planet-2-planet ;) (Score:5, Funny)
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Reply from the Martian MPAA... (Score:5, Funny)
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Moreover I have to assume that eventually people will actually begin to *live* on mars. First just to work, sending money back, but eventually bringing families over and having kids and such... and at that point they'll start thinking about making a new country. And then
IP Over Astronaut Avian Carriers w/Jetpack? (Score:2, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carrie
Adeptus
imagine: gww://google.com (Score:2)
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not on the galaxy wide web ;) (Score:2)
20 minutes! (Score:3, Funny)
What is the maximum latency for communication? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll be keeping an eye on this to see how they address these sorts of issues. Also, does this not relate to RFC 1149 [ietf.org]? Certainly the latency issue is common.
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Months or years. Keep in mind that people used to communicate over long distances via hand-written letters, and that was the only option.
If you mean semi-realtime communication (sitting and waiting for an answer) most people won't put up with latencies longer than a minute or so. While you're waiting for a reply you can go do something else, and at that point, you might as well just be using email.
Re:What is the maximum latency for communication? (Score:4, Informative)
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Of course some peop
Check out RFC 1149 (CPIP) (Score:2)
Then it was done for real, using live birds to carry the data. I think they tried a Ping and maybe a telnet session. There is a real RFC written up on this. Not
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And all the astronauts will be on WoW (Score:2)
Big cache? (Score:2)
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Current limits of technology (Score:5, Informative)
Mars is, roughly, between 50 and 250 million miles away from earth, depending where we are in our solar orbits. Recently, the closest it's been in a long while is nearly 35 million miles (back in 2003 according to the Intertron)... but the distance swings rapidly as we race around our orbits... it can go from 40 million to 200 million in the space of a few months. I'm using 50 million as a rough average for the sake of illustration.
Given the speed of light, as fast as we think we can go, is *only* 670 million mph... that means the fastest one way trip we think anything can do is still going to take 4.5 minutes... it'll be better when it's closer (just over 3 minutes) and worse when it's on the opposite side of the sun (22 minutes)... and remember thats just one way!
Even if we plant a colony on mars, you won't be seeing ms ping times between earth.sol and mars.sol until there a breakthrough in our understanding of physics and we figure out how to go faster than the speed of light.
For those who didn't want to bother to read this post, if you want to play Halo XXV on a Mars server, you'll need to figure out a way to communicate with that installation at superluminal speeds.
What a fun project! (Score:5, Interesting)
With a twenty minute delay, the standard practice of resending dropped packets becomes more prohibitive (the send/NAK/resend would take an hour!), so you'd have to make the encoding redundant enough so that most errors could be recovered by the receiver - without doubling the bandwidth. Oh, it would be fun!
Ok, I'll go back to writing documentation now. >sigh
Maybe (Score:2)
So, this means (Score:2)
InterPlaNet? (Score:4, Funny)
Sweet! Amazon Women on the moon! (Score:3, Funny)
More lawsuits (Score:2, Funny)
fuel; sample return (Score:2)
It's silly to be talking about Mars bases, etc., when we haven't even done a sample return mission yet. A sample return could go a long way toward settling the question of whether there's actually microbial life on Mars.
As this stuff gets more complex, it totally makes sense to do anything you can do to cut down on the complexity. If landers only need a low-power radio, and a low-gain antenna, in order to talk to a permanenet orbiting comm satellite, that's a big reduction in complexity.
Another logic
talking without delays using quantum entanglement (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as i know there is no limit on distance, changes in one atom happens at the same time on the other atom altough they are on different locations. Thats a quantum physic property
But i'm not sure if information can be passed trough this method (wel hack thats worth investigation)
Re:talking without delays using quantum entangleme (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:talking without delays using quantum entangleme (Score:4, Informative)
Not possible according to wikipedia:
As a result, measurements performed on one system seem to be instantaneously influencing other systems entangled with it. But quantum entanglement does not enable the transmission of classical information faster than the speed of light (see discussion in next section below).
and here:
Although no information can be transmitted through entanglement alone, it is possible to transmit information using a set of entangled states used in conjunction with a classical information channel. This process is known as quantum teleportation. Despite its name, quantum teleportation cannot be used to transmit information faster than light, because a classical information channel is required.
Re:talking without delays using quantum entangleme (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that whenever you observe one atom, the super-position collapses instantaneously for both. That means the receiver needs to know that the sender has already measured the atom on the sending end before observing their atom on the receiving end, this would have to be done by a standard, non-FTL signal. You also have the problem of not being able to collapse the super-position into a specific value (say 0 or 1), so while the receiver would know what state the sender's atom is in, that state is a random value (0 or 1), so no data is actually conveyed.
The first problem may be overcome with some time-based scheme, where the sender and receiver have syncronized clocks, and have agreed at what time the sender will measure his atom. The problem with random waveform collapse, however, would be harder to overcome, though I think the quantum computers in recent articles have managed to make it slightly less-random.
Need the communication network (Score:2)
uucp, USENET, 747 - all good analogs. UDP (Score:2, Informative)
A 747 full of HD-DVDs or Blue-Rays has high bandwidth but terrible latency.
Any reason UDP's "send and forget" with an appropriate application- and link-level protocol can't be used? Of course, this would only be useful for non-latency-sensitive applications, such as a scheduled "push" of data, where the
Unfortunately, Text Only... (Score:2)
And so the "Net of a Million Lies" is begun.
now I'll.. (Score:2)
CJC
I can see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
From: Martian Barrister Bob N'g'w'll'ac
Utopia Planitia Law Firm
Legal Practitioners
Mars.
Confidential Proposal/Investment Assistance.
Greetings and love to you in the name of the most high Xenu from my beloved planet Mars. I am sorry and I solicit your permission into your privacy. I am Martian Barrister Bob N'g'w'll'ac, lawyer to the late Prince Grunthor eldest son of the late former Emperor of Mars late Warlord Xandor.
My former client late Prince Grunthor died in a plane crash in the year 2094. Upon the death of my former client and unknown to the family that is currently under house arrest and undergoing prosecution in the hands of the present administration as a result of human right violation and looting of the planet's treasury by the late head of state Warlord Xandor.
Before the death of my client he had deposited 90,000,000.00 Martian Mega-bucks with a secret security firm in two trunk boxes in my name, and I am the only authority to this fund which he was to transfer off world few days after he died in a plane crash.
This fund was deposited with the security firm in my name because my client stole this fund from the planet's treasury and he did not want anyone to know that he is associated with the fund in question not until the fund is successfully moved off world.
The security firm does not know the actual content of the trunk boxes, my client and I told them that the boxes contains old Martian artifacts to be delivered to a client off world via Interplanetary Courier Services. For now it is only you and I that is having knowledge of this fund, and the only assistance I require from you is to help me receive this fund in either Amsterdam, London or Spain depending on our country of agreement and possibly invest it abroad in your area of advice.
This fund shall be disbursed accordingly as follows: 25% for the recipient (you) from the total sum(90MMMB). 2% for the courier officer in the country where you shall receive the trunk boxes. 5% set aside from the entire sum for expenses incurred by both parties in due course of executing this transaction (home and abroad). 68% for me.
If you are not satisfied with the percentage sharing of the fund feel free to let me know. In compliance with this you are to immediately forward to me by mail the following: Your full names and address Confidential space phone and space fax numbers.
With this information I will immediately commence all necessary documentation for a successful shipment of the first trunk box to your country of choice as all the modalities have already been worked out by me. I will also give you full details of this whole transaction which I have already perfected in due course.
Please note that you are to treat this with utmost confidentiality willing or not willing to assist me in this transaction as nobody knows about this fund and I am still an active lawyer in this country.
THE CHOICE IS YOURS, IF I WERE YOU I WOULD, BECAUSE IT WILL COST YOU LITTLE OR NOTHING TO ACHIEVE THIS AND THE BENEFIT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER.
Remain blessed in the name of XENU.
Yours faithfully Martian Barrister Bob N'g'w'll'ac
Don't underestimate... (Score:4, Funny)