8 ms·

> the first crews to Mars may have to deal with day after day of seeing nothing but the star-flecked blackness of space. At least they will probably have wifi.

> the first crews to Mars may have to deal with day after day of seeing nothing but the star-flecked blackness of space. At least they will probably have wifi. If only. TCP at those latencies will be completely unusable. Even if you manage to “trick” TCP with a middlebox that fakes ACKs you’d still be waiting minutes just for an HTTPS connection to establish.

pc86 8y ago
The obvious solution is to download the entire internet onto the spacecraft. Seriously though, they'll need to have some sort of non-work, non-research activities to last the months it will take to get anywhere. You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times.
- overcast 8y ago
  Stock up on movies, and books? I mean that's pretty much the daily life of most people on this planet right now. Go to work, come home, engage in entertainment / sex. Beyond that, they can't really expect to be able to go outside and walk in the park. I think everyone is overestimating how much free time these guys will have. It's not the equivalent of sitting in a prison cell without mission responsibilities(experiments, chores, food).
  - monkeynotes 8y ago
    Exercise, books, chess, learn a language, I can think of plenty of stuff to do. People in prison sometimes enjoy the opportunity they have to focus on self improvement without the stress of having to make money for food/shelter. Surely being on a craft in deep space is not that much different to being on a nuclear sub for months and months on end, smaller I guess.
    - yomly 8y ago
      Do the subs not have internet access or comms to outside world?
      - adrianN 8y ago
        Nuclear subs predate the Internet and I suppose you also want to limit your non-internet comm activity when sitting somewhere in the ocean waiting for a Russian first strike.
      - roywiggins 8y ago
        Radio waves don't work great under the oceans. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...
      - beamatronic 8y ago
        They do indeed perform a “sync” when they surface briefly.
    - overcast 8y ago
      Considering submarines and prisons historically aren't coed, I'd say space travel fares a bit better for basic human needs.
      - monkeynotes 8y ago
        Same sex relationships in prisons and subs aside, I actually think intimate relationships between a confined team that works and lives together is a bad idea. The team needs to depend on each other hugely and having the emotional demands of a intimate relationship could make things pretty difficult for those involved directly or indirectly. Obviously relationships will develop regardless, you put people together they are going to do stuff. It's just a another challenge, in my mind, rather than an advantage.
        overcast 8y ago
        No different than sex in the workplace, clearly not a good idea, obviously it's going to happen. You hang out with someone long enough, they start being attractive.
        rdrey 8y ago
        Gimlet Media has a fun podcast following a year-long mock space mission. It explores the topic of relationships in a confined space, too: https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > People in prison sometimes enjoy the opportunity they have to focus on self improvement without the stress of having to make money for food/shelter. If not for the criminal record being a huge factor in job applications later, I'd consider low-security prison to be a pretty good way of getting a sabbatical. It's almost like basic income.
      - pc86 8y ago
        In my state at least it's only for 7 years and only felonies or financial crimes. So you could always commit some non-financial misdemeanor and refuse to do any pretrial diversion program if you wanted, I guess.
      - whatshisface 8y ago
        That's why "prison is punishment" is supported by some people - if there should exist a social self-improvement program, shouldn't we be giving it to those whose behaviors we want to encourage?
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I think the issue here really is that regular life became so fucked up that prison seems like a better option. Isolation from participating in society should be punishment on its own, but it isn't, given how the participation looks for most people. Reminds me of that time I remember from my childhood, when my dad had a friend in a hospital, and would go on ranting about how that friend has much worse food and entertainment than a typical prisoner...
  - jobigoud 8y ago
    VR headsets should be pretty decent by then, so a virtual walk in the park might be doable. Either on the treadmill or flying around trees in zero G.
  - spapas82 8y ago
    If I was there I'd get a copy of all tutorials on https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x along with my favourite batteries included programming language... Actully, now that I think better of it I wouldn't need a batteries included language; having so much time I could implement the "batteries" myself!
  - heartles 8y ago
    That makes me wonder, what kind of bandwidth could you get out there? Obviously latency will be bad, but if bandwidth is good enough they might still be able to download a data pack daily containing messages from loved ones, news, and the occasional movie
    - Tepix 8y ago
      Lasers are getting more common for high speed space comms, i think the range isn't quite there yet to manage the Earth-Mars distance.
  - pronoiac 8y ago
    Cuba has "Paquete Semanal," a weekly-updated offline selective mirror of the Internet, passed around via hard drives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-i...
- s0l1dsnak3123 8y ago
  > You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times. Speak for yourself! :D
  - Casseres 8y ago
    Triopoly: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3758/triopoly https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3758/triopoly The description says "three-dimensional" but I would argue that it's two-dimensional and regular Monopoly is one-dimensional (linear). I think with a lot of time on your hands, you could make Monopoly truely three-dimensional with layers, and then even four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time.
    - ReverseCold 8y ago
      > four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time Or use a fourth spatial dimension, like a 4D Rubik's Cube or Miegakure.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      4-dimensional Monopoly. Reminds me of Continuum series. Is getting a seat in the Corporate Congress a victory or defeat condition?
- Shivetya 8y ago
  The vetting system will have to be tailored very strict to insure they have the right personality and drive to survive such a mission. I could swear I have read of such testing to have taken place already to get some benchmarks to apply to actual travelers.
  - OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
    "right personality" I.E. boring, un-energetic people who have little sense of personal space.
    - pc86 8y ago
      Yes because when I read the biographies of the the latest round of astronaut trainee, it's a total snooze fest.
    - cryoshon 8y ago
      hey, just because you wouldn't want to spend time around them doesn't mean that society doesn't need them. i think your description is correct, but still. there's a lot to be said for the virtues of being eminently stable. besides, the creative people can do the thinking for them from earth.
    - l1n 8y ago
      I'd say creative doesn't hurt: honestly, I know quite a few folks who would kill to run a D&D campaign or the like uninterrupted for months on end. And your players won't have other obligations to catch them off guard :)
- galieos_ghost 8y ago
  Humans got by for thousands of years by simply gathering around the fire and telling stories. I think people could adapt to not having something(the internet) that humans didn't have at all until the last few decades. It's fairly disturbing that some people can't even imagine surviving without modern conveniences.
  - pc86 8y ago
    Surely you can understand the differences between being a pre-agricultural tribe on the Serengeti with absolute freedom and being one of 5 people from probably 3-4 countries sitting in an aluminum tube the size of a small boat.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  > The obvious solution is to download the entire internet onto the spacecraft. This isn't as silly as it sounds. Netflix already offers boxes ISPs can put in their datacenter. They store the entire library locally. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ Plop Wikipedia, Netflix, a daily snapshot of news, social media, Reddit, etc. on one and you've probably got enough for most folks.
  - dtech 8y ago
    I believe it's not the entire library, bus a dynamically maintained cache of the most popular content over that connection. More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      > I believe it's not the entire library https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592590450 https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592... > According to Netflix's own documentation, "An individual appliance can oﬄoad approximately 60%-80% of content requests depending on country catalog size," but when units start working in pairs, the storage size can exceed the size of Netflix's library for a region. And when this happens, the pair will use their excess storage to double up on stuff to help deal with high demand, or to make sure that if one fails, the other still has as much content as possible. > More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship. No need to have the entire internet, just the most popular tenth of a percent, and just daily updates of what's new. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html is currently downloading from Mars at 3 megabit. I'd expect Earth-to-Mars can be much faster than Mars-to-Earth from a car-sized orbiter with a small dish and limited power. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19950183 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19950183 indicates optical Mars-to-Earth links of 1 Gbps soon, as well. For Netflix, just send a new box every 3-6 months on the next rocket. The ISS already gets in-theater movies well before they're released on DVD, so you could even have release dates synchronized for no delay whatsoever!
- noonespecial 8y ago
  Even without "cryosleep" or the combined download of the world's entertainment aboard, the crossing will be a walk in the park compared to what explorers on early sailing ships endured. Plus they probably won't get scurvy, so there is that.
- txcwpalpha 8y ago
  Civilization survived for ages without the internet, so I'm sure that we'll be able to find some way to keep people occupied while in space without it. There's an ongoing/recurring experiment that NASA runs where a group of pretend-astronauts spends several months in a pretend Mars habitat with limited internet connection to Earth [1]. A podcast [2] was recently released where they go in-depth and interview the participants, and they touch on the whole "what am I supposed to do without the internet for 6 months?" issue a lot, but it never really seems to be that big of an issue. They do get bored, but most of the participants do stuff like learn a new language, study a textbook, or read a lot of novels. They also have a lot of "work" (like experiments etc) to keep them busy every day. 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mars-research-crew-emerges-after-8-months-of-isolation-2017-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mars-research-crew-emerges... 2: https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat
  - PyroLagus 8y ago
    > Civilization survived for ages without the internet, so I'm sure that we'll be able to find some way to keep people occupied while in space without it. Yes, but they weren't trapped in a metal box for years.
- alex_duf 8y ago
  Yeah, I would recommend embedding wikipedia, duolingo, a whole bunch of TV series and movies, the top 10% of spotify, the top 10% of youtube, and the top 10% of steam. It's not perfect but assuming you can make a static version of these I'm sure you can fit it under a few terabytes.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
  They could write an operating system.
- CM30 8y ago
  Download a ton of video games for the crew? I mean, ROMs for old systems are pretty easy to get by the bucketload, and careful use of stuff like GOG could get plenty of hours of DRM free entertainment for space travel related purposes. But yeah, I think a sample of the internet stored offline could work. Maybe mix that with a P2P system that lets people post pages, social media posts, etc with other people on the ship, like you can with IPFS/Freenet/ZeroNet/whatever.
- grawprog 8y ago
  >You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times. Says you.
adrianN 8y ago
The interplanetary net will probably look a lot like Usenet.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Not bad!
- TruthSHIFT 8y ago
  That sounds pretty great.
- jpm_sd 8y ago
  This concept was excitingly dramatized (and lovingly parodied) in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", a 90s sci-fi classic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
te0006 8y ago
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4838 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4838 "Delay-Tolerant Networking Architecture This document describes an architecture for delay-tolerant and disruption-tolerant networks, and is an evolution of the architecture originally designed for the Interplanetary Internet, a communication system envisioned to provide Internet-like services across interplanetary distances in support of deep space exploration."
- dsr_ 8y ago
  Or you could use UUCP.
  - Isamu 8y ago
    Usenet will make a comeback! Over interplanetary UUCP.
- amelius 8y ago
  The problem is that servers on Earth may still fail with timeouts of different kinds above the networking level. For example, when requesting a video stream from Netflix, they may send some control packets along, and with round-trip times of >1 minute, the server may think that your client is behaving erratically, and disconnect you.
  - yoz-y 8y ago
    They could have a proxy that would buffer requests and received data and then use the delay tolerant protocol to send that to spacecraft I suppose?
  - ss248 8y ago
    Easily solvable with something like proxy server on earth. Also i don't think it's smart to directly connect spaceship to the internet, so proxy should already be there in the original design.
    - amelius 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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lossolo 8y ago
I don't think anyone is even considering to use TCP for interplanetary communication. You would use other protocol to communicate between planets and then only on earth you would switch to TCP or other protocol (depending what you would like to do) for fetching data from internet. Then get the data through proxy on earth and deliver it through this protocol to the other planet.
Retric 8y ago
The internet is not limited to TCP/IP many phones browsers used a different protocol to connect to a proxy server which downgraded images to save bandwidth. A similar approach means a website might take a 4+ minutes to start downloading but would finish in under a second and allow for video streaming etc. Sure not all websites would work, but you could easily use Reddit, YouTube, and email.
- zingmars 8y ago
  I'm not so sure about YouTube. It's a huge distance, and the potential for data loss somewhere in the middle is pretty large and video consumes a lot of bandwidth. E-mail might be doable, but for reddit you would need A LOT of patience since it's going to take ages to load the cat picture you just clicked on.
  - Retric 8y ago
    YouTube for a few people is fairly low bandwidth data, so they can probably just send several copies of the same stream preferably after re encoding it. Unless the packet loss is extreme it's not going to be an issue. For Reddit, I would assume they would start downloading before you click on something. It eat's bandwidth, but again bandwidth is a non issue it's really just latency.
blhack 8y ago
Ah, this actually seems okay to me. My web browser use is often opening several tabs in the background while I read the one I am on. A four minute delay for the background ones sounds fine (if I'm on my way to mars, that is. For my home connection obviously this would be awful).
throwaway2016a 8y ago
I'm guessing there would be some sort of CDN edge node with optimistic pre-caching. I'm sure Netflix would be willing to set up a Netflix Open Connect box on Mars so at least they can binge watch Stranger Things and The Santa Clarita Diet. Plus, put enough people (a few hundred?) on mars and and the content they could produce on their own local domain might be compelling.
lisper 8y ago
Ironically, I cannot read the original article because I'm on a boat with a satellite internet connection. Ping times are only 750ms, but the web is still barely usable. I can read HN because it's text-only, but that's about it. Visitors to Mars definitely won't be streaming Netflix. (But they'll probably have an SSD with a nice video library on it!)
soperj 8y ago
>the first crews to Mars may have to deal with day after day of seeing nothing but the star-flecked blackness of space. Yeah I don't understand this at all. Currently there is a Space Station circling the earth which people spend months at a time on, and they're busy as all hell. I doubt there will be nothing to do on a trip to Mars.
NickBusey 8y ago
This is literally what IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/ was created to solve.
- alex_duf 8y ago
  Without knowing I would assume IPFS is built on TCP, wouldn't that be an issue?
  - carry_bit 8y ago
    It's built on a generic interface so other protocols could be used.
  - lgierth 8y ago
    More transports coming! IPFS is built on libp2p, and so far all available libp2p transports have been stream-oriented (TCP, Websockets, WebRTC, Onion, QUIC), but different types of transports are in the works: packet-oriented (UDP, Ethernet, WebRTC-unreliable) and store-and-forward. Apart from that IPFS is built and layered in a way that makes the application layer independent of transport semantics - the network in terms of connections and hosts is abstracted away.

pc86 8y ago

The obvious solution is to download the entire internet onto the spacecraft. Seriously though, they'll need to have some sort of non-work, non-research activities to last the months it will take to get anywhere. You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times.

overcast 8y ago
Stock up on movies, and books? I mean that's pretty much the daily life of most people on this planet right now. Go to work, come home, engage in entertainment / sex. Beyond that, they can't really expect to be able to go outside and walk in the park. I think everyone is overestimating how much free time these guys will have. It's not the equivalent of sitting in a prison cell without mission responsibilities(experiments, chores, food).
- monkeynotes 8y ago
  Exercise, books, chess, learn a language, I can think of plenty of stuff to do. People in prison sometimes enjoy the opportunity they have to focus on self improvement without the stress of having to make money for food/shelter. Surely being on a craft in deep space is not that much different to being on a nuclear sub for months and months on end, smaller I guess.
  - yomly 8y ago
    Do the subs not have internet access or comms to outside world?
    - adrianN 8y ago
      Nuclear subs predate the Internet and I suppose you also want to limit your non-internet comm activity when sitting somewhere in the ocean waiting for a Russian first strike.
    - roywiggins 8y ago
      Radio waves don't work great under the oceans. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...
    - beamatronic 8y ago
      They do indeed perform a “sync” when they surface briefly.
  - overcast 8y ago
    Considering submarines and prisons historically aren't coed, I'd say space travel fares a bit better for basic human needs.
    - monkeynotes 8y ago
      Same sex relationships in prisons and subs aside, I actually think intimate relationships between a confined team that works and lives together is a bad idea. The team needs to depend on each other hugely and having the emotional demands of a intimate relationship could make things pretty difficult for those involved directly or indirectly. Obviously relationships will develop regardless, you put people together they are going to do stuff. It's just a another challenge, in my mind, rather than an advantage.
      - overcast 8y ago
        No different than sex in the workplace, clearly not a good idea, obviously it's going to happen. You hang out with someone long enough, they start being attractive.
      - rdrey 8y ago
        Gimlet Media has a fun podcast following a year-long mock space mission. It explores the topic of relationships in a confined space, too: https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > People in prison sometimes enjoy the opportunity they have to focus on self improvement without the stress of having to make money for food/shelter. If not for the criminal record being a huge factor in job applications later, I'd consider low-security prison to be a pretty good way of getting a sabbatical. It's almost like basic income.
    - pc86 8y ago
      In my state at least it's only for 7 years and only felonies or financial crimes. So you could always commit some non-financial misdemeanor and refuse to do any pretrial diversion program if you wanted, I guess.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      That's why "prison is punishment" is supported by some people - if there should exist a social self-improvement program, shouldn't we be giving it to those whose behaviors we want to encourage?
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I think the issue here really is that regular life became so fucked up that prison seems like a better option. Isolation from participating in society should be punishment on its own, but it isn't, given how the participation looks for most people. Reminds me of that time I remember from my childhood, when my dad had a friend in a hospital, and would go on ranting about how that friend has much worse food and entertainment than a typical prisoner...
- jobigoud 8y ago
  VR headsets should be pretty decent by then, so a virtual walk in the park might be doable. Either on the treadmill or flying around trees in zero G.
- spapas82 8y ago
  If I was there I'd get a copy of all tutorials on https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x along with my favourite batteries included programming language... Actully, now that I think better of it I wouldn't need a batteries included language; having so much time I could implement the "batteries" myself!
- heartles 8y ago
  That makes me wonder, what kind of bandwidth could you get out there? Obviously latency will be bad, but if bandwidth is good enough they might still be able to download a data pack daily containing messages from loved ones, news, and the occasional movie
  - Tepix 8y ago
    Lasers are getting more common for high speed space comms, i think the range isn't quite there yet to manage the Earth-Mars distance.
- pronoiac 8y ago
  Cuba has "Paquete Semanal," a weekly-updated offline selective mirror of the Internet, passed around via hard drives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-i...
s0l1dsnak3123 8y ago
> You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times. Speak for yourself! :D
- Casseres 8y ago
  Triopoly: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3758/triopoly https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3758/triopoly The description says "three-dimensional" but I would argue that it's two-dimensional and regular Monopoly is one-dimensional (linear). I think with a lot of time on your hands, you could make Monopoly truely three-dimensional with layers, and then even four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time.
  - ReverseCold 8y ago
    > four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time Or use a fourth spatial dimension, like a 4D Rubik's Cube or Miegakure.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    4-dimensional Monopoly. Reminds me of Continuum series. Is getting a seat in the Corporate Congress a victory or defeat condition?
Shivetya 8y ago
The vetting system will have to be tailored very strict to insure they have the right personality and drive to survive such a mission. I could swear I have read of such testing to have taken place already to get some benchmarks to apply to actual travelers.
- OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
  "right personality" I.E. boring, un-energetic people who have little sense of personal space.
  - pc86 8y ago
    Yes because when I read the biographies of the the latest round of astronaut trainee, it's a total snooze fest.
  - cryoshon 8y ago
    hey, just because you wouldn't want to spend time around them doesn't mean that society doesn't need them. i think your description is correct, but still. there's a lot to be said for the virtues of being eminently stable. besides, the creative people can do the thinking for them from earth.
  - l1n 8y ago
    I'd say creative doesn't hurt: honestly, I know quite a few folks who would kill to run a D&D campaign or the like uninterrupted for months on end. And your players won't have other obligations to catch them off guard :)
galieos_ghost 8y ago
Humans got by for thousands of years by simply gathering around the fire and telling stories. I think people could adapt to not having something(the internet) that humans didn't have at all until the last few decades. It's fairly disturbing that some people can't even imagine surviving without modern conveniences.
- pc86 8y ago
  Surely you can understand the differences between being a pre-agricultural tribe on the Serengeti with absolute freedom and being one of 5 people from probably 3-4 countries sitting in an aluminum tube the size of a small boat.
ceejayoz 8y ago
> The obvious solution is to download the entire internet onto the spacecraft. This isn't as silly as it sounds. Netflix already offers boxes ISPs can put in their datacenter. They store the entire library locally. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ Plop Wikipedia, Netflix, a daily snapshot of news, social media, Reddit, etc. on one and you've probably got enough for most folks.
- dtech 8y ago
  I believe it's not the entire library, bus a dynamically maintained cache of the most popular content over that connection. More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    > I believe it's not the entire library https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592590450 https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592... > According to Netflix's own documentation, "An individual appliance can oﬄoad approximately 60%-80% of content requests depending on country catalog size," but when units start working in pairs, the storage size can exceed the size of Netflix's library for a region. And when this happens, the pair will use their excess storage to double up on stuff to help deal with high demand, or to make sure that if one fails, the other still has as much content as possible. > More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship. No need to have the entire internet, just the most popular tenth of a percent, and just daily updates of what's new. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html is currently downloading from Mars at 3 megabit. I'd expect Earth-to-Mars can be much faster than Mars-to-Earth from a car-sized orbiter with a small dish and limited power. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19950183 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19950183 indicates optical Mars-to-Earth links of 1 Gbps soon, as well. For Netflix, just send a new box every 3-6 months on the next rocket. The ISS already gets in-theater movies well before they're released on DVD, so you could even have release dates synchronized for no delay whatsoever!
noonespecial 8y ago
Even without "cryosleep" or the combined download of the world's entertainment aboard, the crossing will be a walk in the park compared to what explorers on early sailing ships endured. Plus they probably won't get scurvy, so there is that.
txcwpalpha 8y ago
Civilization survived for ages without the internet, so I'm sure that we'll be able to find some way to keep people occupied while in space without it. There's an ongoing/recurring experiment that NASA runs where a group of pretend-astronauts spends several months in a pretend Mars habitat with limited internet connection to Earth [1]. A podcast [2] was recently released where they go in-depth and interview the participants, and they touch on the whole "what am I supposed to do without the internet for 6 months?" issue a lot, but it never really seems to be that big of an issue. They do get bored, but most of the participants do stuff like learn a new language, study a textbook, or read a lot of novels. They also have a lot of "work" (like experiments etc) to keep them busy every day. 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mars-research-crew-emerges-after-8-months-of-isolation-2017-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mars-research-crew-emerges... 2: https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat
- PyroLagus 8y ago
  > Civilization survived for ages without the internet, so I'm sure that we'll be able to find some way to keep people occupied while in space without it. Yes, but they weren't trapped in a metal box for years.
alex_duf 8y ago
Yeah, I would recommend embedding wikipedia, duolingo, a whole bunch of TV series and movies, the top 10% of spotify, the top 10% of youtube, and the top 10% of steam. It's not perfect but assuming you can make a static version of these I'm sure you can fit it under a few terabytes.
0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
They could write an operating system.
CM30 8y ago
Download a ton of video games for the crew? I mean, ROMs for old systems are pretty easy to get by the bucketload, and careful use of stuff like GOG could get plenty of hours of DRM free entertainment for space travel related purposes. But yeah, I think a sample of the internet stored offline could work. Maybe mix that with a P2P system that lets people post pages, social media posts, etc with other people on the ship, like you can with IPFS/Freenet/ZeroNet/whatever.
grawprog 8y ago
>You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times. Says you.

adrianN 8y ago

The interplanetary net will probably look a lot like Usenet.

jacobush 8y ago
Not bad!
TruthSHIFT 8y ago
That sounds pretty great.
jpm_sd 8y ago
This concept was excitingly dramatized (and lovingly parodied) in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", a 90s sci-fi classic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

te0006 8y ago

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4838 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4838 "Delay-Tolerant Networking Architecture This document describes an architecture for delay-tolerant and disruption-tolerant networks, and is an evolution of the architecture originally designed for the Interplanetary Internet, a communication system envisioned to provide Internet-like services across interplanetary distances in support of deep space exploration."

dsr_ 8y ago
Or you could use UUCP.
- Isamu 8y ago
  Usenet will make a comeback! Over interplanetary UUCP.
amelius 8y ago
The problem is that servers on Earth may still fail with timeouts of different kinds above the networking level. For example, when requesting a video stream from Netflix, they may send some control packets along, and with round-trip times of >1 minute, the server may think that your client is behaving erratically, and disconnect you.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  They could have a proxy that would buffer requests and received data and then use the delay tolerant protocol to send that to spacecraft I suppose?
- ss248 8y ago
  Easily solvable with something like proxy server on earth. Also i don't think it's smart to directly connect spaceship to the internet, so proxy should already be there in the original design.
  - amelius 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lossolo 8y ago

I don't think anyone is even considering to use TCP for interplanetary communication. You would use other protocol to communicate between planets and then only on earth you would switch to TCP or other protocol (depending what you would like to do) for fetching data from internet. Then get the data through proxy on earth and deliver it through this protocol to the other planet.

Retric 8y ago

The internet is not limited to TCP/IP many phones browsers used a different protocol to connect to a proxy server which downgraded images to save bandwidth. A similar approach means a website might take a 4+ minutes to start downloading but would finish in under a second and allow for video streaming etc. Sure not all websites would work, but you could easily use Reddit, YouTube, and email.

zingmars 8y ago
I'm not so sure about YouTube. It's a huge distance, and the potential for data loss somewhere in the middle is pretty large and video consumes a lot of bandwidth. E-mail might be doable, but for reddit you would need A LOT of patience since it's going to take ages to load the cat picture you just clicked on.
- Retric 8y ago
  YouTube for a few people is fairly low bandwidth data, so they can probably just send several copies of the same stream preferably after re encoding it. Unless the packet loss is extreme it's not going to be an issue. For Reddit, I would assume they would start downloading before you click on something. It eat's bandwidth, but again bandwidth is a non issue it's really just latency.

blhack 8y ago

Ah, this actually seems okay to me. My web browser use is often opening several tabs in the background while I read the one I am on. A four minute delay for the background ones sounds fine (if I'm on my way to mars, that is. For my home connection obviously this would be awful).

throwaway2016a 8y ago

I'm guessing there would be some sort of CDN edge node with optimistic pre-caching. I'm sure Netflix would be willing to set up a Netflix Open Connect box on Mars so at least they can binge watch Stranger Things and The Santa Clarita Diet. Plus, put enough people (a few hundred?) on mars and and the content they could produce on their own local domain might be compelling.

lisper 8y ago

Ironically, I cannot read the original article because I'm on a boat with a satellite internet connection. Ping times are only 750ms, but the web is still barely usable. I can read HN because it's text-only, but that's about it. Visitors to Mars definitely won't be streaming Netflix. (But they'll probably have an SSD with a nice video library on it!)

soperj 8y ago

>the first crews to Mars may have to deal with day after day of seeing nothing but the star-flecked blackness of space. Yeah I don't understand this at all. Currently there is a Space Station circling the earth which people spend months at a time on, and they're busy as all hell. I doubt there will be nothing to do on a trip to Mars.

NickBusey 8y ago

This is literally what IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/ was created to solve.

alex_duf 8y ago
Without knowing I would assume IPFS is built on TCP, wouldn't that be an issue?
- carry_bit 8y ago
  It's built on a generic interface so other protocols could be used.
- lgierth 8y ago
  More transports coming! IPFS is built on libp2p, and so far all available libp2p transports have been stream-oriented (TCP, Websockets, WebRTC, Onion, QUIC), but different types of transports are in the works: packet-oriented (UDP, Ethernet, WebRTC-unreliable) and store-and-forward. Apart from that IPFS is built and layered in a way that makes the application layer independent of transport semantics - the network in terms of connections and hosts is abstracted away.