7 ms·

Vint Cerf’s Plan for Building An Internet in Space

The_rationalist 6y ago
What about neutrino communication? It's the biggest spectrum we haven't analyzed yet and it would perfectly make sense for an advanced civilization because it pass through matter much better than any other alternative.
- tlb 6y ago
  Passing through matter isn't a big problem with interplanetary communication? With a few antennas distributed around the respective planets (and a few in orbit if you want to work during eclipses) you can ensure line-of-sight transmission.
- jacobush 6y ago
  Did anyone do High Frequency Trading with neutrinos yet?
  - andrekandre 6y ago
    no, but i heard tachyons are great for dealing in futures...
somesortofsystm 6y ago
I've always wondered about the feasibility of using space for temporary/short-term storage needs. I remember a time when, as a junior developer, I'd log into operations, and hand the operator my tape reel with my work for the day - and she'd go off, mount the spool, and start the streaming, until my files were available in local storage for a few hours, and then .. when logging out, I'd have the operator re-stream the files, and off we go .. So, why not use space as a large tape buffer? Send the satellites off, 20 minutes of light-speed away, and use the big gap as a cache. Seems sorta feasible to me, but I guess I'm overlooking some ridiculously obvious factor, such as launch costs, viability, etc. But really, seems like a fleet of satellites spread out around the solar system could function as quite a nice medium ..
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  I think the thing that you're missing is that there's no shortage of physical space right here? Said differently, why not build that satellite, load it up, and instead of launching it.... put it in the closet. Get it out when you need it. What advantages does that launch have?
  - robryk 6y ago
    GP doesn't want to store the data on the satellite, but rather use the space in-between as a Friday line storage. The satellite would be a repeater that retransmits what it receives. If it was 20 light minutes away, there would be 40 minutes worth of data in transit, so the whole system could store 40 minutes long circular buffer.
    - qz2 6y ago
      Might be a bit lossy :)
      - MayeulC 6y ago
        Right, so you have to send CRCs as well. The nice thing about this scheme is that you don't technically need to send an active repeater: the mirrors on the moon could already serve this purpose. At the end of the day, it's a tradeoff between the cost of extra storage, the sequential aspect of data retrieval from a delay line, and its energy cost.
  - 1_person 6y ago
    I believe he's implying the use of the satellite as a repeater and the intervening space as a delay line I do not think it's viable in any sense with launch costs but in a hypothetical scenario where you had something 20 light minutes away with a channel that had no better use you certainly could buffer 40 minutes of data on the channel It is limited here not by the availability of space but the ability to collimate the signal and the availability of power density at the receiver to discern the signal from noise
CGamesPlay 6y ago
The protocols are interesting, but it seems to me that point-to-point is more applicable in the vast emptiness that is outer space. Why send a packet to Mars when Jupiter is 5° to the left and I have a clear line of sight to both?
- dahfizz 6y ago
  That's a routing question, nothing in the transport protocols preclude that. If your router decides it has a direct route to Jupiter then it probably won't hop to Mars.
- NortySpock 6y ago
  The planet or moon may be facing the wrong way for you to be able to send a message directly to the rover or base on the surface. Using your example, and assuming you want to send a message to a moon base on the surface of Callisto, a moon of Jupiter: while you may have a clear line to Jupiter, the point on the surface of Callisto that you want to send a message may not be in your line-of-sight because it is facing away from you. So your route becomes Earth -> Jupiter Communications Satellite 3 -> Callisto ComSat 10 -> Callisto Base Alpha Assuming you want to send a message to the far side of Luna, even then the best path may be a commsat in high orbit around Luna -> Comsat in low orbit around Luna -> FarSide Base. I agree, rarely are you going to need to bounce from Mars to Jupiter, but for low-priority bulk traffic (scientific images, etc) and enough nodes, it might be worthwhile to bounce from Mars to Jupiter to Luna to Earth if all communication nodes were otherwise idle. The Delay Tolerant Network Vint Cerf is working on supports knowledge of when certain antennas have available communication windows to different nodes, and can schedule and route communication accordingly. Source: Myself, did a presentation on it in college
- est31 6y ago
  You don't always have a clear line of sight. E.g. when you communicate with a satellite orbiting mars, the planet will get in between for a period of time. Furthermore, even if you have clear line of sight, repeaters on the way can be helpful because the inverse square law even holds for lasers (the light isn't perfectly parallel, there is no such solution to the maxwell equations (outside of an infinite plane emitting light perpendicular to it), instead it's a gaussian beam). Last, you only have a limited amount of spectrum you can send to or receive from a specific point in the sky. Beyond that, it gets hard really quick. If you have repeater stations far away so that they can be targeted from the distance, you can increase the maximum bandwidth. This is mainly a concern once the interplanetary bandwidth is maxed out.
Angostura 6y ago
I remember talking to him about this in the late 1990s. He might have been talking at Comdex or somewhere.
vaxman 6y ago
Vint Cerf and RMS ... what a pair. Vint helped spread the Internet beyond borders and to every Windows computer on the planet via async (aka PPP aka RAS). Sounds so awesome, doesn't it? Meanwhile old RMS, an academic with tenure/nearly guaranteed income for life, finished us all off by establishing a political system that attracted all of the young minds to give away their software in such a way as to allow adversarial countries to obtain a 30 YEAR technological jumps without spending a friggin' dime. (If you had any doubt that was his plan, you need only read https://news.slashdot.org/story/07/04/21/2025226/rms-protest-song-on-gitmo https://news.slashdot.org/story/07/04/21/2025226/rms-protest...) Combined, they created a platform for extremely ignorant and naive people to sip cups of coffee while uploading our national infrastructure and data to run on all that free software all over the planet. Yeah, they got theirs --now hackers are pouring through their websites and databases, Russia has ultrasonic weapons (who needs "StarTrek transporters" to deliver surprises) and China's Navy is the largest (sorry Taiwan!) Don't even get me started about China's Space deployments --to orbit, the dark side of the moon and beyond. Maybe they can increase their efficiency using Vint Cerf's new suite of protocols.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Nationalistic anti-OSS sentiment. Interesting. I can't say I've seen that over twenty years. Unique if nothing else.
- mda 6y ago
  I am having difficulty understanding this post.
  - exdsq 6y ago
    RMS started giving software away for free (or, helped push for open software) which gave countries like China a jump-start. As someone else said, I've never seen nationalistic views on OSS before but it is absurd.
- paublyrne 6y ago
  Sorry, who or what is RMS?
chris123 6y ago
Next they'll be saying, Bitcoin will be the interplanetary reserve asset. Then the interstellar. Intergalactic. Universal. Not in our lifetimes, is course. But it's coming.
- tomp 6y ago
  How will you achieve consensus with years-long communication delays?
  - wmf 6y ago
    The base layer consensus protocol would run at decade speed and would just be used to net out long-term/long-distance differences; most transactions would be on higher-layer systems that settle faster. Charles Stross explains this stuff in Neptune's Brood.
    - boomlinde 6y ago
      How convenient that there's a fictional space opera that can verify your predictions of the future.
      - wmf 6y ago
        For what it's worth, I don't actually believe any of this. Cryptocurrency isn't the future of finance on this planet, let alone others.
justicezyx 6y ago
DTN once was a fashionable research topic in before 2012, never thought it could actually been implemented.
- jandrese 6y ago
  There was the DTNBone, but without a killer app and with the reference implementation being rather touchy and hard to debug for novices it never really went anywhere. DTN ended up having some use cases, but they were so narrow that it never really made it out of the lab except for a handful of NASA links and some abortive military applications from people trying to solve the mobile ad-hoc routing problem.
egberts1 6y ago
We have been experimenting with DTN network since 1996 with different types of delay mechanism based on different environment settings. It’s nice to see them in action now.

What about neutrino communication? It's the biggest spectrum we haven't analyzed yet and it would perfectly make sense for an advanced civilization because it pass through matter much better than any other alternative.

tlb 6y ago
Passing through matter isn't a big problem with interplanetary communication? With a few antennas distributed around the respective planets (and a few in orbit if you want to work during eclipses) you can ensure line-of-sight transmission.
jacobush 6y ago
Did anyone do High Frequency Trading with neutrinos yet?
- andrekandre 6y ago
  no, but i heard tachyons are great for dealing in futures...

somesortofsystm 6y ago

I've always wondered about the feasibility of using space for temporary/short-term storage needs. I remember a time when, as a junior developer, I'd log into operations, and hand the operator my tape reel with my work for the day - and she'd go off, mount the spool, and start the streaming, until my files were available in local storage for a few hours, and then .. when logging out, I'd have the operator re-stream the files, and off we go .. So, why not use space as a large tape buffer? Send the satellites off, 20 minutes of light-speed away, and use the big gap as a cache. Seems sorta feasible to me, but I guess I'm overlooking some ridiculously obvious factor, such as launch costs, viability, etc. But really, seems like a fleet of satellites spread out around the solar system could function as quite a nice medium ..

CGamesPlay 6y ago
I think the thing that you're missing is that there's no shortage of physical space right here? Said differently, why not build that satellite, load it up, and instead of launching it.... put it in the closet. Get it out when you need it. What advantages does that launch have?
- robryk 6y ago
  GP doesn't want to store the data on the satellite, but rather use the space in-between as a Friday line storage. The satellite would be a repeater that retransmits what it receives. If it was 20 light minutes away, there would be 40 minutes worth of data in transit, so the whole system could store 40 minutes long circular buffer.
  - qz2 6y ago
    Might be a bit lossy :)
    - MayeulC 6y ago
      Right, so you have to send CRCs as well. The nice thing about this scheme is that you don't technically need to send an active repeater: the mirrors on the moon could already serve this purpose. At the end of the day, it's a tradeoff between the cost of extra storage, the sequential aspect of data retrieval from a delay line, and its energy cost.
- 1_person 6y ago
  I believe he's implying the use of the satellite as a repeater and the intervening space as a delay line I do not think it's viable in any sense with launch costs but in a hypothetical scenario where you had something 20 light minutes away with a channel that had no better use you certainly could buffer 40 minutes of data on the channel It is limited here not by the availability of space but the ability to collimate the signal and the availability of power density at the receiver to discern the signal from noise

CGamesPlay 6y ago

The protocols are interesting, but it seems to me that point-to-point is more applicable in the vast emptiness that is outer space. Why send a packet to Mars when Jupiter is 5° to the left and I have a clear line of sight to both?

dahfizz 6y ago
That's a routing question, nothing in the transport protocols preclude that. If your router decides it has a direct route to Jupiter then it probably won't hop to Mars.
NortySpock 6y ago
The planet or moon may be facing the wrong way for you to be able to send a message directly to the rover or base on the surface. Using your example, and assuming you want to send a message to a moon base on the surface of Callisto, a moon of Jupiter: while you may have a clear line to Jupiter, the point on the surface of Callisto that you want to send a message may not be in your line-of-sight because it is facing away from you. So your route becomes Earth -> Jupiter Communications Satellite 3 -> Callisto ComSat 10 -> Callisto Base Alpha Assuming you want to send a message to the far side of Luna, even then the best path may be a commsat in high orbit around Luna -> Comsat in low orbit around Luna -> FarSide Base. I agree, rarely are you going to need to bounce from Mars to Jupiter, but for low-priority bulk traffic (scientific images, etc) and enough nodes, it might be worthwhile to bounce from Mars to Jupiter to Luna to Earth if all communication nodes were otherwise idle. The Delay Tolerant Network Vint Cerf is working on supports knowledge of when certain antennas have available communication windows to different nodes, and can schedule and route communication accordingly. Source: Myself, did a presentation on it in college
est31 6y ago
You don't always have a clear line of sight. E.g. when you communicate with a satellite orbiting mars, the planet will get in between for a period of time. Furthermore, even if you have clear line of sight, repeaters on the way can be helpful because the inverse square law even holds for lasers (the light isn't perfectly parallel, there is no such solution to the maxwell equations (outside of an infinite plane emitting light perpendicular to it), instead it's a gaussian beam). Last, you only have a limited amount of spectrum you can send to or receive from a specific point in the sky. Beyond that, it gets hard really quick. If you have repeater stations far away so that they can be targeted from the distance, you can increase the maximum bandwidth. This is mainly a concern once the interplanetary bandwidth is maxed out.

Angostura 6y ago

I remember talking to him about this in the late 1990s. He might have been talking at Comdex or somewhere.

vaxman 6y ago

Vint Cerf and RMS ... what a pair. Vint helped spread the Internet beyond borders and to every Windows computer on the planet via async (aka PPP aka RAS). Sounds so awesome, doesn't it? Meanwhile old RMS, an academic with tenure/nearly guaranteed income for life, finished us all off by establishing a political system that attracted all of the young minds to give away their software in such a way as to allow adversarial countries to obtain a 30 YEAR technological jumps without spending a friggin' dime. (If you had any doubt that was his plan, you need only read https://news.slashdot.org/story/07/04/21/2025226/rms-protest-song-on-gitmo https://news.slashdot.org/story/07/04/21/2025226/rms-protest...) Combined, they created a platform for extremely ignorant and naive people to sip cups of coffee while uploading our national infrastructure and data to run on all that free software all over the planet. Yeah, they got theirs --now hackers are pouring through their websites and databases, Russia has ultrasonic weapons (who needs "StarTrek transporters" to deliver surprises) and China's Navy is the largest (sorry Taiwan!) Don't even get me started about China's Space deployments --to orbit, the dark side of the moon and beyond. Maybe they can increase their efficiency using Vint Cerf's new suite of protocols.

renewiltord 6y ago
Nationalistic anti-OSS sentiment. Interesting. I can't say I've seen that over twenty years. Unique if nothing else.
mda 6y ago
I am having difficulty understanding this post.
- exdsq 6y ago
  RMS started giving software away for free (or, helped push for open software) which gave countries like China a jump-start. As someone else said, I've never seen nationalistic views on OSS before but it is absurd.
paublyrne 6y ago
Sorry, who or what is RMS?

chris123 6y ago

Next they'll be saying, Bitcoin will be the interplanetary reserve asset. Then the interstellar. Intergalactic. Universal. Not in our lifetimes, is course. But it's coming.

tomp 6y ago
How will you achieve consensus with years-long communication delays?
- wmf 6y ago
  The base layer consensus protocol would run at decade speed and would just be used to net out long-term/long-distance differences; most transactions would be on higher-layer systems that settle faster. Charles Stross explains this stuff in Neptune's Brood.
  - boomlinde 6y ago
    How convenient that there's a fictional space opera that can verify your predictions of the future.
    - wmf 6y ago
      For what it's worth, I don't actually believe any of this. Cryptocurrency isn't the future of finance on this planet, let alone others.

justicezyx 6y ago

DTN once was a fashionable research topic in before 2012, never thought it could actually been implemented.

jandrese 6y ago
There was the DTNBone, but without a killer app and with the reference implementation being rather touchy and hard to debug for novices it never really went anywhere. DTN ended up having some use cases, but they were so narrow that it never really made it out of the lab except for a handful of NASA links and some abortive military applications from people trying to solve the mobile ad-hoc routing problem.

egberts1 6y ago

We have been experimenting with DTN network since 1996 with different types of delay mechanism based on different environment settings. It’s nice to see them in action now.