this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023

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The Internet and Fediverse in a High Latency Future? (monero.town)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by shortwavesurfer@monero.town to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] tikitaki@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 1 points 1 year ago

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)?

[–] janus2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] freeman@lemmy.pub 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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”

[–] NotAnArdvark@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If we're presuming humanity is space fairing, then maybe by that time quantum entanglement has solved the problem of high latency communication.

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 2 points 1 year ago

That may be possible. Break the light speed barrier through quantum physics.

[–] atlasraven31@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

This is basis for Battletech's Hyper Pulse Generator (HPG) network. The issue is that bandwidth is limited.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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