No, I'm saying the less impedance mismatch we have with the real physical world the easier things will be to work and make scale beyond earth (we will need a ne

No, I'm saying the less impedance mismatch we have with the real physical world the easier things will be to work and make scale beyond earth (we will need a network that can scale to mars, for example, soonish). Fundamentally, we are limited by the laws of physics, so it is beneficial to understand them. We build abstractions because they are useful, but we also often build the wrong abstractions - this is the entire history of science - building better abstractions. Simpler abstractions are great, but they can limit you. We can build all kinds of wonderful machinery with just classical physics, but if you want the modern world with GPS etc. you need relativity to make it work. All the databases based on truetime are great and marvels of engineering, but they won't be able to scale to even a second planet (getting a GPS equivalent to work across two planets is orders of magnitude harder than the earth one, not to mention the latency). I'm not condoning your idea of a database that explicitly uses frames, but rather something based on more physical foundations like cause-and-effect. As I mentioned, I think vector clocks satisfy this. But maybe there are other better alternatives. I'm fully aware of the physics (I have a MPhys, and DPhil in Particle Physics from Oxford).