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.
Presumably there would be a cache on Mars of [email protected] so that anybody who wants to view it would not have to wait 10 minutes… they would get the cached update - so they would immediately see the community as it was 10 minutes ago.
This cache would be continuously updating so to the user on Mars, there actually isn’t that much disruption. Every time they check, there would be updates.
10 minutes or even 40 minutes is not that long in the grand scheme of things. We start talking about lightyears is when I think it starts to break down.
TCP/IP stacks are going to need pretty large buffers if a packet needs resending and takes 20 minutes round trip to get it.
Link layer protocols are going to need to implement some kind of redundancy and parity scheme that accounts for the enormous latency (I’m sure NASA already has something like this)
Also the default 300 second HTTP timeout is going to need to be adjusted lol
I think lemmy already caches content. Viewing beehaw from mars.social should not feel unresponsive even though you’re looking at content that is 10-20 minutes old.
The only issue might be when Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of Sol. Then the cache get’s held for however many weeks it takes for a clear signal to go through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet
there has been some thought about this. imagine a series of interplanetary satellites that act as nodes. so you don’t need a clear signal from mars -> earth. you just need a clear signal to the next node, which would presumably be easier
obviously this is all sci-fi talk at this stage, but setting up internet on a mars colony is probably not gonna be the hardest part of colonization
It may not be the hardest part for sure, but could you imagine telling a kid they couldnt watch tiktok because they couldnt connect to the servers? People would never sign up for the mission.
I think that solar flares would be more of an issue as satellites get farther from earth. It’ll take a lot more resources to replace a damaged satellite orbiting mars than it would for one orbiting earth.
Not once microgravity manufacturing is implimented. Pull an asteroid into dock, break it down, and use the parts to make just the satelite. No rockets required! (Way oversimplifying it of course. But even mars-based satelite manufacturing would be much more energy inexpensive)
But how would the cached copy be started to begin with? Take a server to earth and plug it in to the net? Rsync (if it will establish the connection to begin with)?
You would obviously need to adjust a lot of software that has expectations for timeouts but there is no general technical issue that would prevent most protocols from working even with much higher latencies.
The ones most affected would be the ones where a user expects interactive feedback but the computers don’t care if they have to wait 3 ms or 30 minutes for a response as long as the timeouts are adjusted accordingly.
You would have to start adjusting for that on the lowest levels though since even TCP has a lot of assumptions for reasonable response times built in.
Usenet over UUCP used to function with effective latency of 24-48 hours: 0-24 hours to wait for the nightly dialup call to exchange new messages, and 24 more hours to get the responses. There are a lot of protocols that don’t work well, but federated message exchange is one that actually is more or less perfectly suited to a high-latency environment.
here’s hoping we invent the ansible (and that whatever physics voodoo required to run it isn’t so expensive that it remains inaccessible to the general public)
it would be cosmically funny if we end up with FTL physical transport before FTL information transport, and thus a gigantic interstellar sneakernet industry.
*slaps roof of warp-capable starliner* this bad boy can fit so many fuckin exobyte flash drives in it
GALACTIC SNEAKERPUNK
Even with normal comms. I wouldnt be shocked if there are times where things, like the sun, would interfere with radio communications and thus we may need some type of relay arrays.
My guess is latency of 15-20 minutes would be acceptable and there would be a big infrastructure to cache and handle distribution.
Heck even lemmy synchronization can get behind by more than 15 minutes……
But the real answer is in Star Trek “open. Subspace channel”
Protocols can be swapped out. That has to be one of the easiest parts of expanding to a new planet. Lemmy already has a problem with displaying the delay accessing a new community to users, but I imagine it will be fixed soon, and then we’ll just have to get used to it. Differences that can’t be engineered away:
Fediverse/internet: Real-time chats won’t exist between planets, and between stars asynchronous communities like this one will be impossible. Instead, years-old content will role in, and if you want to send something specific it will have to be in a self-contained package that can be consumed without much context, almost like a time capsule.
Cryptocurrency: Whatever you’re buying will take at least as long as the data to reach you, and for anything physical probably many, many times more, so it will work about the same.
PS. I habitually use Tor. It’s pretty fine actually, the bigger problem is stuff understandably blocking me.
If we’re presuming humanity is space fairing, then maybe by that time quantum entanglement has solved the problem of high latency communication.
That may be possible. Break the light speed barrier through quantum physics.
This is basis for Battletech’s Hyper Pulse Generator (HPG) network. The issue is that bandwidth is limited.
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.
Payments are solved. Something like she Bitcoin Lightning network make the latency irrelevant.
Caches and new protocols probably.
As far as I know Lemmy already caches content. So a post on earth.social would take 10-20 minutes to reach mars.social, but the browsing on your end would always feel responsive.
Centralized sites that want to be available on Mars will set up servers there as well and do a lot of caching and sync-ing between Earth and Mars to make the browsing feel responsive. For example if you’re using Facebook on Mars you will be using a Mars server and it will feel responsive as usual. But content from Earth will not show up immediately for you, and content you upload will not show up instantly on Earth. The delay will mostly be noticeable if you try to have a discussion with someone from Earth.
For crypto and other networks that expect faster responses, we will probably see a shift in architecture. For example maybe all blockchains will feature a form of sharding where you end up validating/mining blocks only with nodes in proximity and then sync back to a main chain at a large interval, where the latency is ok.
For internet between Mars and Earth you have to deal with a peak latency of twenty minutes, forty for duplex. I don’t think TCP/IP is designed in any way to deal with that. You’d have to come up with a translational protocol with TCP/IP buffers on either end. I don’t think it would be that difficult to engineer in terms of current technology.
Another issue is link speed and bandwidth, the distance causes signal degradation. You have to run transmission speeds lower. It might be possible to use repeater satellites to alleviate issues. That’s commonly done on Earth bound communications.
There is a way to create data links that don’t rely on RF using quantum entanglement. It would be zero latency across all of space. It’s sci-fi tech, but it’s hugely more feasible than things like warp drives and transporters. We’re already developing tech that utilizes quantum states .
