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Off topic: I met Vint Cerf at a Keck Institute for Space Studies [1] workshop on computing infrastructure in deep space. He was knowledgeable, energetic, funny

Off topic: I met Vint Cerf at a Keck Institute for Space Studies [1] workshop on computing infrastructure in deep space. He was knowledgeable, energetic, funny, and volunteered to take notes for an all-day working session. The goal was to lay out requirements and benefits of flying servers to orbit around distant bodies for on-site analysis. You can get a lot of data from cameras, but you can't send nearly any of it back, so do interactive data reduction on site, right? He was at Google Loon at the time, working on their delay-tolerant networking & dynamic routing for their baloon-internet architecture. He's been super active in the NASA community working on their delay-tolerant networking architecture. The whole stack is really beautiful. In space, you know when nodes are coming over the horizon because they are in regular orbit, so you can plan routes for the future using "contact-graph routing", and use store-and-forward to massively increase throughput. (e.g., orbiters hold data automatically until they are in sight of the next hop). Nothing you can do about latency, with speed of light and all that though :) JPL has an open-source implementation maintained by Scott Burleigh, another really neat person, and I think JHU/APL does too. [2] Anyway. The guy is smart, sure, but he's also immediately influential: You can't help but agree with him when he pushes these simple, effective ideas naturally. 1. https://kiss.caltech.edu/ https://kiss.caltech.edu/ 2. https://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/

EddySchauHai 4y ago
He gave a talk at a company I used to work at on the history of the internet and his thoughts on its future, it was really cool to listen to him talk on these subjects!
- nominusllc 4y ago
  I'd love to see a video of this. Unfortunately archive.org is drawing a blank on this name. Do you perhaps have a link you can share to slides or video?
  - EddySchauHai 4y ago
    It was an internal lecture at IOHK, a crypto company [0]. I don’t work in the field anymore but IOHK was very fun for the chance to listen to people like Cerf, Leslie, Wolfson, etc. [0] https://youtu.be/PvmreRAlHMg https://youtu.be/PvmreRAlHMg
    - nominusllc 4y ago
      Thanks!
jedberg 4y ago
> Nothing you can do about latency, with speed of light and all that though Why do we take this for granted? I understand the laws of physics and all, but 120 years ago we didn't think humans could fly through the air, and now we have a million+ humans flying every day, and occasionally one goes to outer space. Why do we consider communication faster than the speed of light so unbreakable?
- fbanon 4y ago
  120 years ago we knew that some things can fly, because we saw birds. We just had to figure out how to do the same with humans. On the other hand, we have never encountered anything in nature that goes faster than the speed of light. That's a pretty good hint that it's impossible to do so.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tialaramex 4y ago
  "The speed of light" is probably not what you think it is. This constant, c, is actually about how time (one of our four dimensions, often labelled t) is related to the three spatial dimensions (often x, y, z). Light goes that fast (in a vacuum) because from the light's point of view that's how those dimensions are related, it's not really a "speed limit" it's up against, any more than you'd consider it a "time limit" that hours have sixty minutes in them. The light is just moving through time as well as space, and that's how it has to work. So, because it's about the relationship between time and space, what you're talking about with "faster than light" is actually a time machine. Now, you might notice that before the aeroplane there were birds (and bats, and insects, but lets focus on birds). Clearly flying is possible, a sparrow can do it. But you may have noticed from the lack of time travelling visitors that time travel does not seem to be possible.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    I knew that about the speed of light (but thank you for writing it out). My knowledge of entanglement is limited, but haven't we observed entangled particles seemingly communicate faster than light? While time travel may not be possible, maybe time traveling data is?

EddySchauHai 4y ago

He gave a talk at a company I used to work at on the history of the internet and his thoughts on its future, it was really cool to listen to him talk on these subjects!

nominusllc 4y ago
I'd love to see a video of this. Unfortunately archive.org is drawing a blank on this name. Do you perhaps have a link you can share to slides or video?
- EddySchauHai 4y ago
  It was an internal lecture at IOHK, a crypto company [0]. I don’t work in the field anymore but IOHK was very fun for the chance to listen to people like Cerf, Leslie, Wolfson, etc. [0] https://youtu.be/PvmreRAlHMg https://youtu.be/PvmreRAlHMg
  - nominusllc 4y ago
    Thanks!

jedberg 4y ago

> Nothing you can do about latency, with speed of light and all that though Why do we take this for granted? I understand the laws of physics and all, but 120 years ago we didn't think humans could fly through the air, and now we have a million+ humans flying every day, and occasionally one goes to outer space. Why do we consider communication faster than the speed of light so unbreakable?

fbanon 4y ago
120 years ago we knew that some things can fly, because we saw birds. We just had to figure out how to do the same with humans. On the other hand, we have never encountered anything in nature that goes faster than the speed of light. That's a pretty good hint that it's impossible to do so.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tialaramex 4y ago
"The speed of light" is probably not what you think it is. This constant, c, is actually about how time (one of our four dimensions, often labelled t) is related to the three spatial dimensions (often x, y, z). Light goes that fast (in a vacuum) because from the light's point of view that's how those dimensions are related, it's not really a "speed limit" it's up against, any more than you'd consider it a "time limit" that hours have sixty minutes in them. The light is just moving through time as well as space, and that's how it has to work. So, because it's about the relationship between time and space, what you're talking about with "faster than light" is actually a time machine. Now, you might notice that before the aeroplane there were birds (and bats, and insects, but lets focus on birds). Clearly flying is possible, a sparrow can do it. But you may have noticed from the lack of time travelling visitors that time travel does not seem to be possible.
- jedberg 4y ago
  I knew that about the speed of light (but thank you for writing it out). My knowledge of entanglement is limited, but haven't we observed entangled particles seemingly communicate faster than light? While time travel may not be possible, maybe time traveling data is?