this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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What strikes me is not the bandwidth achieved but the precision of the technology to aim the laser. 19 million miles is a great distance to successfully aim a beam of light. As this technology develops, real time communications with objects in orbit like around Mars will be possible.
Well realtime is just not true. But cool technology nonetheless.
It's really not at these scales. Earth and Mars go from roughly 4 light minutes apart to over 20.
At the best case, saying something and then waiting 8 minutes for a response is hardly what I'd call "real time".
Speed of light is insanely slow at the cosmic scale.
No, it's not slow, at all. It's the speed of light.
Unfortunately for us humans, we are a relatively fast form of life, when compared against the scale of our solar system, much less our galaxy, even when communicating at the speed of light.
It's the fastest speed information can go through space, as far as we know. Unfortunately, there's a lot of space. And a mean a LOT.
I'm wondering if we will need to tweak our Internet protocols to include interplanetary time? I would imagine mirroring would be much more important. Because light can only go so fast.
Yes, the high latency and intermittent connectivity is a big challenge. Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is one good way of solving this problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
I think the issue, again will be date and time.
DDMMYYYY + Planet + Orbit?
software developers are seething
UTC and forget
I'm sure several OSI layers have already been modified by NASA to suit their needs. But, the protocols will pretty much remain standard.
The beam is reeeealy wide by the time it gets there. Still a great achivement, though.
I presume that we're not yet concerned with what the Ansible tech awoke in the vast emptiness between, hmm?