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 know you're kidding, but it underscores the point Cerf is trying to make. In standard TCP/IP, any download is a 2 way conversation, with the receiving party verifying all packets. A mutation of the current UDP model would do just as you say, where you would get long streams of unverified data from one source to another, with a simple acknowledgment packet at the end. The problem lies in possible transmission errors, of which there are many. If they go optical, (which I can't even fathom, but I suppose I don't know everything about optical open space comms) the slightest piece of debris in the signal path will cause packet corruption (making fault tolerance a central concern). If they go RF, well, there's a metric butt load of natural RF interference in space. That satellite is gonna need some big rabbit ears to pick up a whole stream without problems.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday February 22 2007, @10:36AM (#18108922)
My parents recently moved my family to Mars. I'm an avid gamer, but I'm now having a hard time playing online games as my ping is frequently 20 minutes or more. I've added 8 CPUs to my network card, but it hasn't helped the situation any. I'm wondering if anyone has found any solutions to this problem? I'm looking into using wormholes or possibly bending space-time in some other way, but I'm just not sure where to direct my efforts. I really miss playing Doom XV online, and I hear Duke Nukem Forever will be out soon, so any help would be appreciated.
Nahh, wormholes and bending space time are too complex.
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.
With dual Quantum-Nano processors, just open the holo-window dialog box and set the video refresh to -20 minutes. Make sure you avert your eyes from the dialog box when making the change, however, since once it's measured, it ceases to exist.
Have you Upgraded to Microsoft Primus II for your operating system? It uses Quantium physics and has a reliable stack for the "spooky action at a distance" that actually is stolen from BSD 64.2 but nobody seems to care.
Parts of this planet we live on don't even have access to a broadband Internet connection, and now they want to plug Mars on the network? Talk about priorities...
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.
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.
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.
It's probably political as much as economic. Many countries have government-granted monopolies for their phone companies, and these lumbering monopolists have little reason to change the infrastructure.
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.
I'm not aware of any places except maybe near the North or South Poles where people don't have access to two-way satellite Internet like DirectPC. 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
Pinging marsbase.com [1.55.123.1] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 1.55.123.1: bytes=32 time=1199990ms TTL=1200000 Reply from 1.55.123.1: bytes=32 time=1199997ms TTL=1200000 Reply from 1.55.123.1: bytes=32 time=1200030ms TTL=1200000 Reply from 1.55.123.1: bytes=32 time=1200017ms TTL=1200000
Ping statistics for 1.55.123.1: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 1199990ms, Maximum = 1200030ms, Average = 1200016ms
From the presentation on IPN I saw a few years back, it appears that you wont be pinging marsbase.com..... they actually fancy adding a couple of levels to get some real TLDs.....
ping marsbase.com.mars.sol
When I saw the.sol in the presentation I was pretty impressed... theres a little bit of future proofing in that one....
The Outer Space Treaty says no.... but will that really hold when people start trying to develop commercial interests outside earth? It doesn't deal with private industry very well, pretty much saying their gov't is responsible for them. 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
I wonder what the acceptable max latency could be for 2 way communications. We have become quite used to having near immediate mode communications, and computer networks are possibly dependant on it. At what duration in time does distributed computing fall down? What is the maximum time to live on a TCP packet?
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.
The maximum TTL on a TCP/IP packet is 256 (I'm pretty sure it's unsigned). Of course that means absolutely nothing in this context because the TTL is only decremented (by one) when your packet goes through a router (it's designed to reduce the damage caused by routing loops). That said, there are timeouts in the TCP 3 way handshake that make setting up a regular plain vanilla TCP connection with Mars impossible unless you can figure out a way to exceed the speed of light. That's why you have to switch to IPN on the long hop to Mars and run applications that don't care about 20 minutes worth of delay. The applications are really the hardest part, you either have to set up fancy proxies or specifically build your application to handle long delays.
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.
I had a friend who was doing some consulting for a company that wanted to offer satellite based internet connectivity. When they first tried out the system, things took forever to download, despite the fact they had many Meg of bandwidth. Each picture that loaded involved a separate TCP/IP connection, which takes several back and forth messages to establish - which was sluggish because of the latency going to the geosynchronous satellite. (This was several years ago, and all the vendors have very sophisticated understanding of the issues).
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
Just an idea why not used entangled atoms to bypass this distant problem?. 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)
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.
You can transmit information this way, but not faster than light.
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.
ATTN: The President/Ceo 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
This would be a protocol that would bind in with TCP/IP. Former space missions used protocols invented by the companies that built the hardware, not necessarily a common framework. This should change all that...
You validated my post. Most, not all, use CCSDS. And while you can do IP over CCSDS (or at least they have a redbook describing it) it hasn't been done, so far as I can tell. And layering a protocol within a protocol isn't the best solution out there, IMO, you might as well do it right and come up with an IP for space.
"We are working on standardising the protocols to enable spacecraft communicate and share information across the solar system," Cerf said while delivering a talk on the 'Future of the Internet'.
"Communication between a rover operator on Earth and a rover on Mars, via a relay orbiter, can't use standard Internet protocols end-to-end. That problem is at the root of a lot of the design work we're doing for the IPN... As part of the NASA Mars mission programme, the project aims to have by 2008
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Parent
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
Parent
ob Sealab 2021 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Parent
You'll need the nVidia 88800000 GPU card.... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:From Ask Slashdot 2027 (Score:5, Funny)
Give it a try it only needs 640 terabytes of ram.
Parent
Re:From Ask Slashdot 2027 (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:From Ask Slashdot 2027 (Score:4, Funny)
"A spooky action has occurred. Cancel or allow?"
Parent
Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes sense to be looking and working towards the future, this sounds like an interesting project.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Funny)
That's why no work is getting done in my office right now.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Ping (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ping (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Don't worry (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ping (Score:5, Interesting)
ping marsbase.com.mars.sol
When I saw the
Steve.
Parent
Re:Ping (Score:5, Interesting)
Now it's really future-proof
Parent
So P2P now means planet-2-planet ;) (Score:5, Funny)
Reply from the Martian MPAA... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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.
Re:What is the maximum latency for communication? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
InterPlaNet? (Score:4, Funny)
Sweet! Amazon Women on the moon! (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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)
Open protocol (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Open protocol (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How exactly is this news? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)