this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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12
The Internet and Fediverse in a High Latency Future? (monero.town)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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 [email protected] 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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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Presumably there would be a cache on Mars of [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TCP/IP stacks are going to need pretty large buffers if a packet needs resending and takes 20 minutes round trip to get it.

Link layer protocols are going to need to implement some kind of redundancy and parity scheme that accounts for the enormous latency (I’m sure NASA already has something like this)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Also the default 300 second HTTP timeout is going to need to be adjusted lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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)?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think that solar flares would be more of an issue as satellites get farther from earth. It'll take a lot more resources to replace a damaged satellite orbiting mars than it would for one orbiting earth.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 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

[–] [email protected] 1 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 β€œopen. Subspace channel”

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