6 ms·

It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the i

It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net". We're obviously a long way off from colonizing space and needing the Internet to spread, but we still have the physics problems here on Earth. I'm not convinced that centralization in its current iteration (cloud operators controlling huge infrastructures) is the best long run. As we saw with the recent Azure outage in South Central US, even the huge infrastructure can have problems too. Secure decentralization has seemed like a panacea for a long time - for all things that resemble a public utility. Even things like the power grid.

godzillabrennus 8y ago
Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication.
- GW150914 8y ago
  Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication. That makes for good science fiction, because Quantum Mechanics is so poorly understood by most people, but it’s in no way possible or implied by the theory. Any entangled channel of communication would appear to be random noise without a Classical channel of communication, which effectively limits entanglement to light speed. The first answer gives a nice explanation in depth. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-communication-with-quantum-entanglement https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-commu... The key point is this: Alice therefore still measures two overlapping bell curves, overall! Where are the interference patterns?! That is very simple: when Bob and Alice compare their measurements in the first case, Bob's 0-measurement can be used to "filter" Alice's patterns... That comparison is what requires the Classical channel, and we’re back to light speed. If you try to use a Quantum channel to compare you just have two things to compare and a lot of noise.
  - pankajdoharey 8y ago
    I think the best way forward would be Satellite based Internet where people can tune their dish antennas to the sky and get Internet. That would be Interruption free and decentralised. I have very low faith on Bitcoin mining operations to be repurposed for decentralised Internet, though in theory they have the compute nodes no body is free from the Internet service providers. A decentralised network based on existing network can never be totally free or decentralised.
    - bronson 8y ago
      Satellites are decentralized?
- bfuller 8y ago
  This seems relevant to my industry
  - sixdimensional 8y ago
    If your full name is Buckminster Fuller, I can see how you might think so! ;D
- antidesitter 8y ago
  Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem.
nine_k 8y ago
The "Fire upon the Deep" describes an interstellar communication system which is very email-nntp-fidonet like. I'm afraid it's more realistic that we could imagine.
- int_19h 8y ago
  It was written during the time that was the peak of those systems (the endless September would happen a year after the book was published), so there's no surprise there. But I think it's not particularly accurate, in that, while latency would be extreme, that doesn't necessarily translate to bandwidth - and bandwidth constraints shaped Usenet and especially FidoNet as much as latency. I think a more likely primary mode of operation would be WWW-like, but only your local part is actually real-time; everything else is synced in bulk as and when possible, with some creative approaches to update conflicts for writable resources.
  - realPubkey 8y ago
    So basically the offline-first approach
m3at 8y ago
> I'm not convinced that centralization in its current iteration (cloud operators controlling huge infrastructures) is the best long run You might be interested in checking the InterPlanetary File System [1] which attempt to tackle this among other issue. I can't find it now but I remember the doc mentioning the need for a future space network to be decentralized, so there is that too. [1] https://ipfs.io/#why https://ipfs.io/#why
- frio 8y ago
  From a conference I attended years ago, the key motivator is that request/response networking is pretty much already broken when we get to the moon; once Mars comes into the picture, it'll be even more so. When each TCP packet requires an ACK, and an ACK takes minutes to arrive... things break down a bit. So, the idea behind IPFS and others (SSB comes to mind, except, yacht-themed) is that it's largely a collection of offline networks, and when the planets align -- quite literally -- those networks will exchange all their new blocks. It's a neat concept.
  - vlovich123 8y ago
    Each TCP packet does not require an ack, at least not as a "receive TCP packet send out ACK". They're returned collectively as a bitset for the last N packets instead based on your transmission window (which TCP stacks already tune based on your RTT). Can't see how you'd get rid of that if you're looking for reliable real-time transport medium. Additionally you can layer in forward error-correction above TCP to reduce packet loss due to the physical medium.
    - codeka 8y ago
      None of that really matters if Mars is on the other side of sun from Earth. You'd need relay satellites to direct the signal around the sun, and even at the speed of light that's going to take tens of minutes, one way. As the parents suggest, even at Earth-Moon distances, we need to completely rethink things.
      - 8y ago
amelius 8y ago
On a related note, I'm wondering how distributed systems that rely on atomic clocks (e.g. Google Spanner) would work in the space era, given that relativity says that there's no such thing as a global clock.
- ace_of_spades 8y ago
  Not an expert by any means but I would imagine you simply prefix your time with a specific „large-sclae time zone“ that you are moving in, e.g., it could be earth, another planet or your spacecraft. Wouldn‘t solve it completly but seems to be a pragmatic solution that could work alright for most cases. However, a total ordering of events seems plausible only from the relative perspective of an observer and we would need to figure out, how to think about how things like transfer duration affect each oberservers understanding of ordering.
- colordrops 8y ago
  Couldn't you account for relativistic effects and adjust accordingly?
- gunnihinn 8y ago
  I suppose those continue working fine in very local systems (contained in a ball of a few light-seconds radius) whose components move at speeds where relativistic effects can be discarded. Drop those constraints and you also need to drop even system-local globality because of relativity.
  - gunnihinn 8y ago
    You _could_ introduce the One True Lamport Clock, and as long as you're in its light cone you can get global syncronization, but that comes at the cost of having to learn a lot about patience.
    - AllegedAlec 8y ago
      That would only work up until the point at which we start to travel at portions of c.
aaron695 8y ago
> make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net". It is the absolute opposite. Lets say we have a lot of people on Mars or even the moon, it 100% logical all internet will go through one pipe and be cached locally. Goodness me. Would we really expect the super super super expensive outposts would foot the bill to peer to peer other peoples traffic? Hard enough getting it to happen on earth.
_lol 8y ago
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124581/how-to-improve-tcp-ip-for-an-interplanetary-wan https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124581/how...

godzillabrennus 8y ago

Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication.

GW150914 8y ago
Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication. That makes for good science fiction, because Quantum Mechanics is so poorly understood by most people, but it’s in no way possible or implied by the theory. Any entangled channel of communication would appear to be random noise without a Classical channel of communication, which effectively limits entanglement to light speed. The first answer gives a nice explanation in depth. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-communication-with-quantum-entanglement https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-commu... The key point is this: Alice therefore still measures two overlapping bell curves, overall! Where are the interference patterns?! That is very simple: when Bob and Alice compare their measurements in the first case, Bob's 0-measurement can be used to "filter" Alice's patterns... That comparison is what requires the Classical channel, and we’re back to light speed. If you try to use a Quantum channel to compare you just have two things to compare and a lot of noise.
- pankajdoharey 8y ago
  I think the best way forward would be Satellite based Internet where people can tune their dish antennas to the sky and get Internet. That would be Interruption free and decentralised. I have very low faith on Bitcoin mining operations to be repurposed for decentralised Internet, though in theory they have the compute nodes no body is free from the Internet service providers. A decentralised network based on existing network can never be totally free or decentralised.
  - bronson 8y ago
    Satellites are decentralized?
bfuller 8y ago
This seems relevant to my industry
- sixdimensional 8y ago
  If your full name is Buckminster Fuller, I can see how you might think so! ;D
antidesitter 8y ago
Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem.

nine_k 8y ago

The "Fire upon the Deep" describes an interstellar communication system which is very email-nntp-fidonet like. I'm afraid it's more realistic that we could imagine.

int_19h 8y ago
It was written during the time that was the peak of those systems (the endless September would happen a year after the book was published), so there's no surprise there. But I think it's not particularly accurate, in that, while latency would be extreme, that doesn't necessarily translate to bandwidth - and bandwidth constraints shaped Usenet and especially FidoNet as much as latency. I think a more likely primary mode of operation would be WWW-like, but only your local part is actually real-time; everything else is synced in bulk as and when possible, with some creative approaches to update conflicts for writable resources.
- realPubkey 8y ago
  So basically the offline-first approach

m3at 8y ago

> I'm not convinced that centralization in its current iteration (cloud operators controlling huge infrastructures) is the best long run You might be interested in checking the InterPlanetary File System [1] which attempt to tackle this among other issue. I can't find it now but I remember the doc mentioning the need for a future space network to be decentralized, so there is that too. [1] https://ipfs.io/#why https://ipfs.io/#why

frio 8y ago
From a conference I attended years ago, the key motivator is that request/response networking is pretty much already broken when we get to the moon; once Mars comes into the picture, it'll be even more so. When each TCP packet requires an ACK, and an ACK takes minutes to arrive... things break down a bit. So, the idea behind IPFS and others (SSB comes to mind, except, yacht-themed) is that it's largely a collection of offline networks, and when the planets align -- quite literally -- those networks will exchange all their new blocks. It's a neat concept.
- vlovich123 8y ago
  Each TCP packet does not require an ack, at least not as a "receive TCP packet send out ACK". They're returned collectively as a bitset for the last N packets instead based on your transmission window (which TCP stacks already tune based on your RTT). Can't see how you'd get rid of that if you're looking for reliable real-time transport medium. Additionally you can layer in forward error-correction above TCP to reduce packet loss due to the physical medium.
  - codeka 8y ago
    None of that really matters if Mars is on the other side of sun from Earth. You'd need relay satellites to direct the signal around the sun, and even at the speed of light that's going to take tens of minutes, one way. As the parents suggest, even at Earth-Moon distances, we need to completely rethink things.
    - 8y ago

amelius 8y ago

On a related note, I'm wondering how distributed systems that rely on atomic clocks (e.g. Google Spanner) would work in the space era, given that relativity says that there's no such thing as a global clock.

ace_of_spades 8y ago
Not an expert by any means but I would imagine you simply prefix your time with a specific „large-sclae time zone“ that you are moving in, e.g., it could be earth, another planet or your spacecraft. Wouldn‘t solve it completly but seems to be a pragmatic solution that could work alright for most cases. However, a total ordering of events seems plausible only from the relative perspective of an observer and we would need to figure out, how to think about how things like transfer duration affect each oberservers understanding of ordering.
colordrops 8y ago
Couldn't you account for relativistic effects and adjust accordingly?
gunnihinn 8y ago
I suppose those continue working fine in very local systems (contained in a ball of a few light-seconds radius) whose components move at speeds where relativistic effects can be discarded. Drop those constraints and you also need to drop even system-local globality because of relativity.
- gunnihinn 8y ago
  You _could_ introduce the One True Lamport Clock, and as long as you're in its light cone you can get global syncronization, but that comes at the cost of having to learn a lot about patience.
  - AllegedAlec 8y ago
    That would only work up until the point at which we start to travel at portions of c.

aaron695 8y ago

> make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net". It is the absolute opposite. Lets say we have a lot of people on Mars or even the moon, it 100% logical all internet will go through one pipe and be cached locally. Goodness me. Would we really expect the super super super expensive outposts would foot the bill to peer to peer other peoples traffic? Hard enough getting it to happen on earth.

_lol 8y ago

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124581/how-to-improve-tcp-ip-for-an-interplanetary-wan https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124581/how...