5 ms·
OK, so the "Storing data in the network ... " title made me remember something. If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoi
by jvanderbot 10mo ago
OK, so the "Storing data in the network ... " title made me remember something.
If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data.
So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.
- charv 10mo ago"Commenter shows off how smart they are with cool fun fact"
- Sharlin 10mo agoIt's just a fancy form of delay-line memory [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
- lxgr 10mo agoIn a universe with mass–energy equivalence, show me a storage medium that isn’t effectively a delay line :)
- willis936 10mo agoWhat about entangled qubits?
- Aloha 10mo agoyou beat me to it - or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory in general, space is probably closer to an electrical delay line in practice.
- 2026iknewit 10mo agoThere is an archive of a lot of television transmission in space. archive.space You just need to be traveling faster than the radio waves, catch up and enjoy :)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- RobotToaster 10mo agoPeople of Earth. I AM LRRR, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8! We will raise your planet's temperature by one million degrees a day, for five days, unless we see McNeal at 9pm tomorrow - 8 central!
- chuckadams 10mo agoPretty sure just one day would do it for us. Maybe it's Omicronian metric degrees and they're really precise?
- willis936 10mo agoAssuming some pass through non-empty media, isn't it technically possible?
- 2026iknewit 10mo ago[dead]
- btown 10mo agoWith gravitational lensing, this is actually viable! Just send a signal at a gravity sink, and travel at sublight speeds to position yourself in a place where it will be redirected to eventually along a longer path, and you can intercept your own signal! You just have to be really, really lucky.
- Scaevolus 10mo agoYou can use fiber optics as an optical delay line too! About 60KB/km at 100Gbps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
- pkoiralap 10mo agoSo if we can somehow preserve the signal and make it go round and round, can we get long term storage out of nothing?
- terminalkeys 10mo agoNot a scientist, but I assume the signal would degrade or mutate over time due to space radiation and other radio waves.
- PartiallyTyped 10mo agoIt should be same logic we use for repeaters, so it'll be fine.
- Sesse__ 10mo agoThe logic we typically use for repeaters (EDFA, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers) for long-distance lines amplifies but does not clean noise (so across the oceans, you are very much bound by SNR). And you need one of them every 80 km or so in typical fiber.
- lxgr 10mo agoElectromagnetic waves have perfect/lossless superposition, so radiation can’t really degrade a signal that way. The big limiting factors are free space path loss and noise.
- Y_Y 10mo agoThat's only true in classical electrodynamics, as it happens. If you're in a very strong B-field like you might find near a compact object you'll get nonlinear QED effects. You can get a low order correction with Euler-Heisenberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%E2%80%93Heisenberg_Lagrangian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%E2%80%93Heisenberg_Lagra...
- marcosdumay 10mo ago"Nothing" is a funny name for an interplanetary communication network.
- poly2it 10mo agoDefinitely one of the harder drives feasible! Tom 7 did something reminiscent of this if you hadn't seen already: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio.
- pinkmuffinere 10mo agoLove Tom7! The peculiarities of my brain's weirdness obligates me to sing his praises every time he is mentioned.
- lxgr 10mo agoIndeed: https://qntm.org/transi https://qntm.org/transi
- HPsquared 10mo agoYou could totally do that with the mirror on the moon. (Retroreflector + optical data transmission). The moon is approximately (it varies) 1.3 light seconds away, i.e. a 2.6 second round trip, and optical links can have very high data rates. You could fit quite a lot of data on there! (Edit: although maybe the data rate won't be so high at these distances)
- davidkellis 10mo agoSome amateur radio folks do something along similar lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Ear...
- Kim_Bruning 10mo agohttps://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about
- gmfawcett 10mo ago"Going Postal" was brilliant. GNU Terry Pratchett.
- shevy-java 10mo ago> If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence Don't you worry! AI rover robots are soon going to dominate Mars.
- CGMthrowaway 10mo agoLacks the capability of random access, which limits the practicality of it. Cool idea still
- diydsp 10mo agoMy friend Joe Allen did this with the air in a room! https://youtu.be/a5hOmPdxw0U https://youtu.be/a5hOmPdxw0U
- journal 10mo agoBefore I consumed calories over days to figure out syntax. Now, a language model exhausts those calories away in seconds. Eventually we will advance too far into the future that the tail end of humanity will forget how to make pants.
- agumonkey 10mo agoallegedly, this was used long ago. a teacher told us similar stories from his early career in the 80s made my mind tickle for quite a while
- DarmokJalad1701 10mo agoDuring NASA's Deep Space Optical Comms demo (https://www.nasa.gov/mission/deep-space-optical-communications-dsoc/ https://www.nasa.gov/mission/deep-space-optical-communicatio...), they transmitted video at 267 Mbps from 16 million kilometers away. That's 1.78 GiB stored in space while in transit (assuming 53.3 seconds light-speed delay). The furthest they did was 8.3 Mbps at 400 million km which is around ~1.38 GiB in transit.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo agoThat’s so cool! Never knew that
- mapt 10mo ago"a man is not dead while his name is still spoken" GNU John Dearheart
- npongratz 10mo agopingfs has similar inspiration, where storage capacity scales with latency. https://code.kryo.se/pingfs/ https://code.kryo.se/pingfs/ Discussed in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844725
- 542458 10mo agoThere's a short story by Qntm called "Valuable Humans in Transit" that I like quite a bit which hinges on this subject: https://qntm.org/transi https://qntm.org/transi
- Sharlin 10mo agoOne of my favorite pieces of short fiction.
- smarnach 10mo agoThe distance from Earth to Mars is about 3 to 22 light minutes, not 20 to 90. That doesn't change anything about your point, except the capacity is lower.