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 !news@beehaw.org 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 !news@beehaw.org 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.
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)?
I think you’re conflating two different questions here. These questions are really focused on a central question of “How would the internet work with latency measured in minutes, when most systems are configured around latency in milliseconds?” And the answer there is “We’d have to change how some systems work, and others wouldn’t be feasible.” Barring some method of FTL communication (which would be an instant Nobel prize in physics), you’re never going to get real time instant messaging between Earth and Mars, but async methods of communication will work fine, albeit with more latency. But we’re able to exchange digital data across planets now, it’s just that the public internet is built around the assumption that the speed of light is only going to account for ~100ms of lag.
If you take an assumption that high latency digital communication will be feasible relatively soon after we have people living off planet (which is a reasonable assumption), networks like the fediverse will function with a lot of caching, as tikitaki mentioned. You’d never have perfect sync, but the biggest challenge would likely be how much bandwidth is required to keep different caches in sync.
To answer your specific question, you’d probably start an initial cache on planet, then keep it in sync during transit.
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.
We’d need a networked connection between Earth and Mars. As far as what does the caching software-wise, it’d be done using Mars-based Lemmy instances
Apart from timeouts you would also need to adjust any protocol using short-lived credentials, either by accepting outdated credentials from a peer on the other planet or by extending credential lifetimes.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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 .
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.
