The Internet...IN SPACE!

Astronauts aboard the international space station use the Internet...

But like any other communication device, the farther away you are from the transmitter, then the longer it is going to take to receive any communications. No transmissions will travel faster than the transmitter can send, or the receiver can receive...

There are still signals expanding outwards from earth transmissions going back to the first shortwave broadcast almost a hundred years ago. They should be at the edge of our solar system by now.

What I worry about is just like light, how much the signal degrades the further it expands, unless you have repeater satellites that capture and compress the signals back to its original strength and then resend with a new boost...

I'd never really thought of it before, but the internet in space would be sorta impossible, wouldn't it? Well, unless a society has discovered a way to stop signal degradation. The distances are just too vast.

I'm sure that's just a matter of time.

You could have a network of deepspace satellites, but lightspeed is much more limiting than signal degredation.

Of course, the ISS is about 120 miles above Earth, and in virtually constant electronic contact with Earth through various stations on the ground. It's a lot closer than Hawaii is to most Internet sites.

The article has important points, but I almost think it's silly. This has surely been thought about and solved many years ago. I myself have thought of Internet surfing time delay due to lightspeed limitations a few years back - I'm sure I wrote about it here somewhere on AW, though I can't find it offhand.

The Moon wouldn't have too much problem, it just adds about 2 1/2 seconds for a webpage to start to load. Some websites can be that slow now.

All the extra protocols for caching and "subscribing" to websites (so what one sees on it is only a half-hour old) aren't just easy, they've surely already been done. The basic protocols for the Internet were done in the 1970's, and the people who did it back then were far-thinking enough they may have actually thought about talking to or controlling distant spacecraft, and have thought through protocols working over arbitrarily long delays.


ETA: Read this, especially the last comment near the bottom of the page: http://www.telecomramblings.com/2010/12/cisco-stretches-into-orbit-with-space-router/

Man, the gaming ping from our Enceladus base is going to be brutal.

You could have near realtime communication a couple of lightseconds away. Much more than that you could still communicate, but more like the way we communicate with email today, when you don't expect an immediate reply. As for info on websites and databases, a system with local mirrors which are upgraded when possible. On interstellar distances you could update each distant node regularly or when significant changes have occurred. Of course, when we're talking hundreds of years, the info would be considered historical information. Still, unless you invent stable wormholes to send data through, that's what we will have to live with.

There was an astronomy professor at the University of Colorado who had solved (theoretically) the signal degradation issue back 1998. I don't know the details, but it's highly focused lasers on both ends (or something like that). He was so certain it would work that he believed SETI an exercise in futility; once you figured out how to do this, why would you communicate any other way?

I imagine you'd bring the information on the internet (wikipedia, stuff like that) with you to another planet and get periodic updates from Earth.

Supposing we were on mars, there'd be a 45 minute delay in responding to a message (e.g. takes 20+ minutes to get there, and then 20+ minutes to be sent back), so in terms of internet usage, things wouldn't really change. The internet would still function across the vastness of space, but you would have to wait significant amounts of time for data or else get a cache daily (e.g. every day at midnight the local servers on mars download today's pages on earth). However the farther out you go, the less practical this gets at least in terms of updated data. Even considering that the earth broadcasted the information live in real time, you're looking at years to get updated information if you were in a nearby star system.

If a real interstellar civilization type deal existed, I'm sure you'd still get updates, but it would be more like receiving mail on an 18th century whaling ship. The news would be way out of date, but it could still be useful to have. Suppose another wave of colonization vessels is on its way, and those ships travel at like .5C, the speed of radio is still going to outrun them. If you're like 10 light years off, you'll find out about the ships about 10 years before they arrive. Useful to know, but doesn't really allow for any kind of coordination because of the time delay (compare to the 45 minutes for a response from mars, that's annoying but workable).

Communication would be a real challenge, unless we figure out how to build an ansible (faster than light communication device). I don't know if that's possible (probably isn't), but it's FAR more likely than faster than light travel.