You joke, but FTP has indeed actually been used to communicate between Earth and a probe. A team at NASA's JPL , led by Vinton Cerf, completed a study of what w

You joke, but FTP has indeed actually been used to communicate between Earth and a probe. A team at NASA's JPL , led by Vinton Cerf, completed a study of what would be needed for an Interplanetary Internet [1]. There are already IETF RFCs for delay-tolerant networking [2], which include mechanisms for store-and-forward communications (e.g. each transceiver is a relay). Science fiction has some great depictions of interstellar communications, such as my favorite by Vernor Vinge, the Hugo award-winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. It is a most excellent space opera that prominently features an interstellar system like Usenet as part of the plot [3], as well as superhuman intelligence, physics, and all sorts of other wonderful bits. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-tolerant_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-tolerant_networking [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep