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Vint Cerf Talks About The "Interplanetary Internet"
Uncle Humph1 writes "There's an interesting article at NewsForge by Robin (Roblimo)Miller about Vint Cerf giving a presentation to NOVALUG about the Interplanetary Internet and having lunch with them afterward. An interesting read. One of the quotables by Vint with regard to security reads 'We're building in security from end to end,' he says, 'because we don't need headlines saying, '15-year-old takes over Mars.'" Here is some more information about the interplanetary Internet.
Well, accoring to this one documentary I saw, TCP/IP is already in use on at least one other planet.
Interplanetary Internet means intergalactic porn. The triple breasted whore of eroticon six will have her poor web server slashdoted.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
C:\>ping www.marsrover.co.mars
:)
Pinging marsrover.co.mars [68.179.57.159] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 68.179.57.159: bytes=32 time=12100ms TTL=4300
Reply from 68.179.57.159: bytes=32 time=12000ms TTL=4300
Reply from 68.179.57.159: bytes=32 time=11000ms TTL=4300
Reply from 68.179.57.159: bytes=32 time=12000ms TTL=4300
Ping statistics for 68.179.57.159:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 11000ms, Maximum = 12100ms, Average = 11700ms
Won't be playing UT with these guys anytime soon...
Come on guys, Worldcom?
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Just wait till the RIAA goes inter-galactic.
We just have to make sure the URL is kept secret from all slashdot readers. The latency between planets is already long enough.
If slashdot did link to it...it would be like having a server running on a dial-up.
"...and we're collaborating with Worldcom because we want headlines saying:
Profits From Interplanetary Internet Exceed Wildest Expectations
"Hot Stock! Buy Now!" Say Analysts
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Now we can just /. all the approaching asteroids.
"Mars needs IP" or "IP on Mars"?
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
You think the lag time to third world countries is bad? Try third world PLANETS.
Whenever I play quake against guys from Mars, its always the same: they just stand there, and I frag 'em. They must have a latency of several minutes, at least! Other planets are even worse. I once waited all night just to download a 1k faq on Plutonian mining operations, and I can't even COUNT how many connections I've lost completely with servers on Jupiter.
Who could hack those anyway? Of course, it would take forever. Plus, as we all know (having seen Independence Day), servers in space run MacOS (otherwise how would the guy have easily uploaded a virus with his iMAC), which is a bit difficult to hack anyway.
I don't think they have anything to worry about. Except Uranus. I hear they're using unpatched IIS servers there.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
One of the main problems with interplanetary internetworking is the speed of light, since we would be using some form of RF for the actual transmissions. (Blinking lights works disturbingly well, as long as a line of sight is maintained, since at the frequencies of visible light, you can transmit data at more than a terabit per second.)
Don't expect to be able to play Quake across the galactic sea, as you have mulit-minute ping times.
In addition, Telnet seems right out.
The most probable form of interplanetary networking, barring successful use of Bell's Theorem (it has to do with quantum physics, and it is an observed behavior that (A) two particles in contact have spins which eventually synchronize and (B) once split apart, no matter how far apart the particles are, the spins are still in perfect sync), is going to be a store-and-forward systm, like email.
You make requests for pages, a smart terrestrial gateway will spider the links appropiately, hopefully remove the bloody ads and spyware (since one must make the probabilisticly correct assumption we're going to have windows-dependants on the receiving end)... and in about 1.1-1.5t (where t is the period of time it takes for light to get between where you are Earth and back) you get your content.
This system makes bookmarking pages more important, since it could gather pages based on a pre-defined list (like checking out what's on CNN, BBC, Slashdot, etc. etc..)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
This is more a mechanism to get a packet to pay its own way across a network. You can see why Worldcom, and its employee, Mr. Cerf, would be interested in this.
For all he invented the internet, Vint, whether making proposals of this kind or wielding a knife in the draughty halls of ICANN, shows no signs of putting its well-being over that of his employer.
--
E_NOSIG
As anyone who has ever played a U.S. Game on battle.net can attest, Koreans are blamed (justification is another story) for "lagging down the game."
This will take the pressure of the Koreans, first with the Lunarians, and then Martians, who will make the Lunarians look speedy.
I can't just see it now.
Diablo Player 1: Man, those fucking martians, always lagging down the game and spamming those "Give me items messages"... why don't they play with their own people. Diablo Player 2: (several minutes later) HELP ME PLEEEZ... NEED SOJ Diablo Player 1: Fucking Martians.
This is why UUCP can never die. It's perfect for a network like this. You just write up a new transfer protocol with extra-long timeouts and heavy duplication of data to minimize resends and bang! The existing UUCP works between earth and mars.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It seems that having any kind of WWW-like setup between planets (given the speed of light barrier) would be kind of pointless, or at least inefficient. More likely, large data repositories would be stored in duplicate form on each planet. They'd be updated by bulk dump every so often (depending on how much bandwidth is available), but local requests would be handled locally.
/. here on Earth, but then there'd be Marsdot, Jupidot, Plutodot, etc. each catering to its own local community.
Now the problem is, who could afford to do this? Only large organizations, companies, and governments, probably. Also, sites that depend on relatively low-latency interaction (like Slashdot) rather than simple reference libraries (like dictionary.com) might not have duplicates. More likely, you'd end up with functionally-identical but content-different sites... for example, we'd still have
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
it'd take the Earth 8.5 minutes to find out and start heading for interstellar space.
If the sun teleported elsewhere, Earth would be in interstellar space instantaneously!
Vint Cerf also was the keynote speaker at the International Summit for Young Technology Leaders that I attended in Austin, TX in July. He gave what sounds like pretty much the same speech. He envisioned an interplanetary internet system and the need for satellites and interplanetary research equipment to be equipped with TCP/IP capabilities, perferrably IPv6, which he also spoke of the future importance of. He also offered some insight into his own job vitality and said despite the collapse of WorldCom, his division will probably be spared.
Maybe someday, we can /. a server on another planet. Oh what fun!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
ET Ping Home. ET Ping Home.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
. . . the MIME types suggested in RFC1437?
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1437.html
Not 120 seconds...his example numbers were more like 12 seconds. (1 s = 1000 ms).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
FTL Travel is probably never going to be a reality - meaning all those green alien women will just have to pine away for Captain K's hot man love.
However, FTL Communications are probably possible, so we can hope that our overweight, velour wearing descendents might at least talk dirty with some green alien women.
Of course, based on today's internet, those green alien women would probably be fat, balding green alien men and green alien FBI agents on green alien sting missions against the sexually deviant human race.
Unfortunately, this proposed FTL method requires you to ship the quantum-coupled-er...thingies from place to place FIRST, which means we'd have to exchange ambassadors with the green aliens FIRST... meaning Captain K is back in the shag house, big time.
And then, the quantum communications might be a bit, well, odd, as you might recieve cryptic messages like this:
Reply from 68.179.57.159: qubits = 256 95% confidence -11fs<time<-4fs, measured from point of transmission, 95% confidence -14fs<time<-6fs, measured from point of reception.
Which is a reply to the following command:
Pinging hotbabes.co.vulcan [68.179.57.159] with 256 qubits of data.
Which you had not yet actually run. Anyone want to suggest changes to TCP/IP that would allow you to handle when acks arrived before the message they acknowledge has been sent? Just asking.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Yeah, I can't wait until my inbox is crammed full of "All-natural proven method to add inches to your tentacles!" porno spam.
GMD
watch this
Security is nice, but hopefully they will be doing something so some script kiddie doesn't DDOS a craft into Safe Mode.
I guess the birds will need tiny spacesuits and rocket packs to make it back and forth.
Incoming interstellar hen!
Blog,Twitter
the tighter they grip - the more interplanetary internet warez sites will slip through their fingers.
You think the lag time to third world countries is bad? Try third world PLANETS.
...)
Don't look now, but we ARE the third world. (Mars, Venus,
At a minimum it's 0.524 AU. The maximum would be 2.524 AU (when the earth and mars are on opposite sides of the sun) which is 5 times greater than your estimate (for a whopping 21.5 minutes). Of course, good luck getting your radio signal through Sol. Perhaps we have to install some repeaters somewhere (which would make for further delays). Anybody have that Pathagorean theorem handy??
My father is a blogger.
- There are no people on Mars yet. We haven't figured out how to get them there (in terms of ensuring their health and safety; in terms of how we're going to bring them back; in terms of financing the project). There's no timetable for sending people to Mars, so one can neither say "we'd better prepare for this" nor "we're nowhere near needing to prepare for this."
- Less than one percent of the people on this planet have Internet access, yet we're talking about plugging in a place where man probably won't set foot in the next 50 years?
I'm not saying it's not worth discussing the theoretical implications of an interplanetary Internet, especially since it probably won't be built in the lifetime of pioneers like Vint Cerf, and then we'll be saying "if only we could go back and ask Cerf what he thought about this." However, I think we need to note that for the forseeable future, this is just theory.You make some good practical points, but you forgot the most important element:
CACHING
Better keep those cache expiration intervals high.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
One would think that nanomachines would not need something with the complexity of TCP/IP. More likely they would have very little intelligence onboard, and just enough smarts to recieve simple orders from the master controller.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I can see that a lot of people are missing the point of the project.
this is not "hey, I'm on mars, let me browse the 'net" stuff. this is "okay. we need to drop 50 or so data gathering probes, which need to send their info back to a central broadcast point, which will send its info to a satellite, which will send it back to earth" stuff. The reason they're developing open and standard data protocols for this should be obvious - if you craft it from scratch (as they had been doing previously) it's REALLY expensive. I found "the Interplanetery Internet" to be a bit of a misleading title myself at first. but considering that the internet was itself a research tool first and formost, this is only because of prejudices already in my head.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
Since this is way into the future, storage space may not become an issue, each planet (or moon) system could have a repository mirror of every other page. And throughout the day the system would continue to update its mirror of every page within. This doesn't work of course with dynamic content or email, but for mostly static pages, it might be the fastest way to serve content.
-
Now Bob Zubrin will cite unlimited bandwidth as a reason to go to mars.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
... that says "IP on Everything".
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.