This presumes humanity is a space fairing or interplanetary civilization.
How would something like the fediverse, internet, cryptocurrency, etc function with major latency? As an example, a signal takes between 5 and 20 minutes to travel from earth to mars. A roundtrip response would take at best 10 minutes and at worst 40 minutes. Now lets say you live on mars and your home lemmy instance is mars.social. You want to see what news people are chatting about on earth and heard that [email protected] is a good community. If you put that into your instance search box on mars.social the absolute best you can hope for is a response in 10 minutes. I assume the request would totally fail anyway due to rtt being set to low and the packets expiring before they ever reached the destination. The internet we all know and love is totally intolerant of high latency. Just ask people who use satellite internet or tor.
Edit: i think, but am not certain, that ipv6 replaced rtt with hop count. If so this may not be an issue as the time it takes would not matter as long as the hop limit was not reached.
Your assumption about it taking 10 minutes is incorrect.
Say you have an instance, @marslemmy.com
If the instance is federated with beehaw already, and search on mars to the beehaw communities would be instantaneous.
This is because instances cache all federated content. It’s also why if beehaw goes down, and you browse news@beehaw from your instance (say lemmy.ml), it would work.
Of course, new posts and comments and upvotes would take 10 minutes to federate, but that’s unavoidable.