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Interplanetary Internet protocol in devel
shadowlight1 writes "This MaximumPCMag article discusses NASA's current research into interplanetary protocols for Internet data. The research team includes one of the inventor of TCP/IP. Get ready to ping-flood Pluto.
"
Except that your lag will make it seem like you're on another planet.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
if there we're some new physical layer like gravity waves or something able to signal at c^2 - and before quoting Einstein there ARE phenomena that travel >c (they just have NO mass).
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It certainly gives a whole new meaning to "Fingering Uranus."
No I heard about this too. You can take a certain subatomic particle along with its counterpart subatomic particle (not sure which particle it is), and separate the two with an indefinite distance, and if you apply a counterspin on one the other one is IMMEDIATELY affected. Is this correct? If so then it is theoretically possible.
What ping flood Pluto ? I've been trying for years to get a signal thru to Venus and now I find out NASA hasn't come up with the protocol yet. Arrggh !!!!
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Hmm... does anyone remember, maybe it was eighteen months ago or thereabouts, a swiss bank had been funding research into bonded particles (identical particles which behave in a rather odd fashion - if you affect change in one, the change is affected in the other instantaniously, regardless of the distance between them) for secure data transmission (though in a case like this, "transmission" is a misnomer).
Something like this would be useful in cases where arbitrary distances exist between nodes. Granted, a great deal more research would have to be conducted to take this phenominon (which has been demonstrated) and make it a viable means of data exchange, but hey. It'll be a while before we get them martian colonies anyway.
I think that by the time we had a real black hole in our solar system, we'd have more pressing problems than the packet loss.
If I recall, this is an ancient idea. Mighta been in one of the Programming Pearls books?
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Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I've thought about this for a while, ever since satellite was the "next big thing" for high bandwidth ISP connections. The only problem with Satcom this is that it requires either a hell of a lot of satellites in LEO (cf. Iridium) or a few satellites in Geosync.
And if you are dealing with Geosync, you have a minimum 0.5 second round trip, and that isn't even going to the moon, but staying on Earth! Even the moon gives a minimum 3 second round trip.
Scott
"Space is big. Really big!" - William Shatner, SpaceLine.com
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Oh, prawly. I didn't think I was the first person on the planet to come up with that idea.
;)
Although the Programming Pearls books can't be like, real ancient, if the title means what I think it does.
Breace.
Yes, but every fscking comment to this story prior to this one has talked about ping times and packets and other such IP-centric concepts, and some have mentioned TCP/IP by name.
So he's correcting the other commentors, not the story.
So drop your 'no-I'M-greater-than-THOU' attitude.
And, yes, I'll drop mine.
Yes you can do this with any particle with spin (electrons for example). You can also do it with optical polarization of photons. I'm sure other nonlocally entangled two state systems exist.
... it only forces the global system to be consistent with your local measurement. You can use this to transmit a one time pad but the protocols used also require a normal slower than light channel between the sender and reciever.
However, you cannot use this to transmit information. For instance, two entangled particles are emitted separating from each other at a rate of 2c. You measure the state of one of the particles (suppose it is spin up), then the distant particle will then become the appropriate state (say spin down).
Measurement doesn't force the spin state to a value of your choosing
Kevin
1 moon.earth.sol.mw (34.21.56) 500.263 ms 601.991 ms 541.324 ms
2 mars.sol.mw (34.25.5) 180400.005 ms 185394.558 ms *
3 jupiter.sol.mw (54.2.3) 3600530.348 ms 3601001.451 ms 3602219.045 ms
4 pluto.sol.mw (68.3.4) 604803040.079 ms 604804356.086 ms *
Can you imagine the kind of lag you would get? It would take a packet probably between 3-15 minutes. Might be ok for email and newsgroups but not much else.
The two systems are going to know EXACTLY how far apart in time they are or else it will be like two people trying to interupt each other on a cell phone with echo.
Like another person posted I too think it will be alot like UUCP, realtime just isn't possible. Either is handshaking or quick packet recovery. So who thinks the packet size will be over a meg?
Maybe we don't have to deal with planetary lag, after all. Or maybe I've just read Ender's Game one too many times.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I get 2 second ping times on IRC all the time. Does this mean NASA will be running an ircd on their next interplanetary probe?
*grins*
Berlin-- http://www.berlin-consortium.org
DNA just wants to be free...
I bet Stef still couldn't win a Quake game against them, though.
Seriously, though, the time delay makes TCP-style communication silly, and if you're using UDP the lag becomes irrelevent (except in Netrek! :).
It seems bizare that they'd need to invent a new protocol for this when protocols which would function perfectly well already exist.
(Or are they trying to score geek-points?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They seem to have forgotten that UDP is a non-ACK'd unverified non-sequential protocol - you send the packets out and _hope_ they get there. Assuming they can make the networks reliable enough, UDP would be perfect - just send out commands split up into packets, with each packet tagged so they can be reassembled in the correct order, and be sure to send the packets in duplicate, from two different transceivers - then the request can be processed and the data sent back. Obviously, this would not work for things such as web browsing, FTP, and telnet - derivatives of TFTP and finger would be promising though.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
It's true this work has been going on for a while. SCPS is a close relative of TCP/IP - in fact, out-of-the-box TCP/IP is a valid subset of SCPS. SCPS is not intended for terrestrial applications, and its proponents freely admit that its interface to the terrestrial IP network will be through application-level gateways.
.earth domain made me laugh until I remember how those greedy opportunists made Jon Postel's last days a living hell. A pox on all of 'em.
SCPS supports such things as drastically compressed packets, big windows, SACK, several address families (including a really tiny one for a constellation of spacecraft), and a bunch of other not-new ideas. Its file transfer protocol supports hole-filling and such-like, and it has an integrated security protocol with its own complete spec. It's really a pretty good piece of work, and has performed well when tested over satellite links.
But it's not a be-all and end-all (though the earlier poster's information that it has problems came as a surprise to me). Deep-space communications do come with their own set of problems. Doppler shift, strange modulation schemes and the like are all part of the big bad black void.
I'm kind of amused by the considerations of deep-space host naming, though Cerf is correct that the problems of deep-space packet routing are best solved before it becomes a problem rather than after. He's an optimist and a space lover with such a big space bump that he guest-starred on _Earth: Final Conflict_. But the poster who tied this into the ICANN problems and then said he wanted to get rich of the
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While it may seem that there is noone in space, so why bother, it never hurts to prepare... a lot of things seemed to have no practical use when they were invented, including computers (Babbage's difference engine, wow, how amazing! Noone cared!). To have a network in place would be a valubale resource as well as a way of keeping in contact with shuttles, space stations and the like. And of course, a larger-scale network would make it theoretically easier to receive transimissions from other life.... Rax Morgant, who only posted as anonymous coward because the site adamantly refuses to email me my password.... artiraxin@aol.com , I fear no spam!
Naw...remember that TCP/IP isn't a hardware specification. In fact IP's credo is that it a communication protocol that works across various hardware(copper wire, fiber, token ring, interplanetary communication array :-).
"...as will the inventor of TCP/IP, Vinton Cerf, who is known as the "father of the Internet." How dare he steal credit from Algore?
Doh! Beat me to it....
I was just wondering the same thing as well...
any ideas, pass 'em on!
Insert mind here.
You could use lasers however a draw back is you need to have a direct line of sight, all it would take is a lil meteor to block the beam, also the power of the laser required would be enormous, from say earth to mars youd need to set up several "relay" stations between the two planets, in theory this would greatly speed up communication but it would be costly.
I want to clear up a few points .3s(add a .3s buffer and you only need to go to the cell- if the cell does buffering)
1. They're talking about SCPS. There are a few messages that will tell you more about that.
2. The round trip to Pluto is 17hours. You can't send ACK's all the way there and wait for the pack to get back.
But you can do it with a car phone. The distance to cover is less than
3. If I get this right the protocol is going to be some sort of UDP with major ErrorCorrection. Huge proxies are needed at either end of the line if you wanna hug the WEB while hiking(at least past the moon). Of course some data will have to be resent - there will be some sort of send on request mechanism.
4. I got a 1.5 sec lag and still can play Starcraft. So TCP/IP is good enough for wiring the Moon.
One question: How is the above post "Flamebait"?
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"I already have all the latest software."
Obviously, getting radio to the "dark" side of the moon isn't an insurmountable problem, and NASA has plenty of solutions available. (Orbiting a comm sat around Earth - Luna Lagrange point L2, talking to geo-stationary comm-sats would do it)
It's just going to be a bit expensive, and we don't currently need to talk to anybody back there.
By the way. The "dark side" is unseeable to earth, not unlit, by the way.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Well if we want to be able to convert to their protocol, we'd probably want to have domains that mean something everywhere, e.g.: slashdot.org.earth.sol.milkyway, or even slashdot.org.III.sol.milkyway...
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Well, since IPv6 is finally out, we can refer to that as the "New Internet", which makes the previous "New Internet" the "Old Internet", and the "Old Internet" still the "Old Internet", thus squishing the notion of the "Old New Internet".
Huff, Huff!
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"I already have all the latest software."
What's your problem? Ok, it's oversimplified (it's for the press!), but basically he's right - at least for high latency tcp-connections.
As it happens, FTP is already for the University of Mars. Just not telnet.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Now we'll have some really cool excuses for servers being down...
;)
Sorry, our planet was eclipsed.
Damn rocks got in the way of the packets I tells ya!
Ooops, wrong moon
first things aliens will receive from us will be porn banners and spam promising them to lose weight
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
Routing a call to a speeding BMW is not the same as getting data to astronauts. The problem with getting a call to a vehicle is that the position is changing and coverage is limited due to terrain. The problems described in getting data to planetary locations is propagation delay.
Transmit and acknowledgement can work in space, you just need larger timeout values, much larger. The article states that connection-based links are impossible. "Connections" are a state of mind, so to speak. You could achieve connections, they would just be very high latentcy. And things like forward error correction can minimize data loss on high noise radio links.
"Off-the-shelf" technology and know-how should be able to solve the problems described in this article rather quickly.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
What about exporting X from Vega?
"...as will the inventor of TCP/IP, Vinton Cerf, who is known as the "father of the Internet." How dare he steal credit from Algore?
Im thinking the protocol or method would be more similar to UUCP for the exchange of data than TCP/IP. Will kibo gain more followers? I think so.
Bandwidth to Pluto isn't neccesarily going to be all that bad. Latency is what's going to suck. If it takes you 30 seconds to get a packet from point A to point B... that tells you nothing at all about the bandwidth. This is nonintuitive to some people. A common saying back when usenet was done via UUCP instead of TCP/IP was "it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag tapes". A station wagon full of media has a *tremendous* bandwidth, but really poor latency and a huge "packet size". UUCP is actually more suited to interplanetary communications than TCP/IP is. Luckily, we've got some great tools for getting UUCP networks and TCP/IP networks to play together nicely -- mail and news will work without a hitch over UUCP, even today. And MX records mean never having to say "I hate bang paths".
This type of protocol would have to handle huge lag.. Think about it.. it's 8 minutes for light to go from here to the Sun, a bit under an hour to Jupiter, right? Pluto is what, a week? The moon is 1 second each way..
Any protocol that can easily cope with even a 2 second ping time, can be used for all sorts of things.. They make mention to cars and such in the article, but basically you can toss them at any moving target and be okay with it. Nice.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Sorry, but this isn't anything innovative.. we've been doing interplanetary networking for quite some time now..
check www.dark-jedi.net for more info.
- Darth Sidious | Chairman / CEO |Dark Jedi Network Services | http://www.dark-jedi.net
what kind of rubbish is this, by the time were populating other planets dont ya think this protocol will be obsolete?
See : http://www.research.ibm.com/ quantuminfo/teleportation/
We will have "ansibles", ala Ender's Game, eventually. And it will be quite cool!
--
"All that is visible must grow and extend itself into the realm of the invisible."
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
Sigh... we need more military people in /.
Space Communications Protocol, what the author must have been talking about, first of all, is being headed by MITRE (the strap-on brain of DoD back east to help them with anything geek).
The main goal is to delelop a protocol that looks and feels to the user like TCP/IP, but handles the fact that the major reason for packet loss being.. well, lost or damaged packets, literally, out into space.
TCP/IP assumes that lostpackets are because of network congestion, and so a missing packet is requested to be retransmitted.. and this usualy does the trick.. since most terra-nets run on fiber or copper...
If you kept asking for retransmissions in space - you exasserbate the problem so that if the errors grow to only 10^-6, and you use plain ol TCP/IP, the overhead and loss drowns the network out.. and you get nothing.
10^-6 errors can be a good day around here in the space biz... so one of the major points of SCPS is to deal with high BERs differently than TCP/IP, the other, of course, is security (how can you get spy sat data to the ground and beam it with an RF signal that anyone can pick up?)
SCPS has standard ftp, and will encorporate http eventually.. but its not done yet AFAIK.
You can read all about it here...
http://bongo.jpl.nasa.gov/scps
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
This is mostly wrong. What they are talking about is SCPS, something that has been in development for many many years. It's a generalized protocol for delay with massive delays, or even the minor delays with satellite communications compared to terrestrial networks. Also has to deal with high loss, etc. It tries to be a lot of things and that's it's problem with the implementation and functional operation.
technically, channel capacity is proportional to the bandwidth times the log of the snr, which means that channel capacity is still not that bad, even if snr is ridiculously low.
this is, of course, if you can find error-correcting codes that nearly achieve channel capacity with low output error probability, and can be decoded fast enough. there are such codes though, like so-called turbo codes.
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
This is a bit of old news, Vint Cerf has been working on this for more than a year now. He is acting now in advance of bad decisions expected by the ICANNt and NSI. There has been a fight going on for years over expanding the TLDs from the current 227 to thousands, millions, or an unlimited number.
.earth, and there were several hundred machines on the internet which used .earth with a physical location for a hostname (leuven.earth, london.earth, ougadougou.earth :-) Sendmail on those hosts believed the fake RNSs added to the bind root.hints file, and the whole thing worked quite nicely from 1989 until 1997. Then Vint asked our group to stop using .earth so he could plan on using it as a new TLD as part of an interplanetary addressing scheme.
.earth as a TLD, and the gateways sending messages between the earth domain and the space domain. Could get very rich that way :-)
Then I could be anti@cypher, and my mail would get to me, and you could eyeball my webpage http://www.anti.cypher and so on.
For years I ran a shadow TLD of
There are several projects going on at the same time for this "interplanetary internet" (exonet?, xenonet?). Vint Cerf and company are working on an extensible naming scheme for planets, moons, orbits, asteroids and ships in transit.
There is another group working on reliable transmission protocols and routing protocols to deal with huge round trip times and extremely expensive transmission costs. Just ACKing a transmission is not going to cut it, the ACKs need to be piggybacked on transmissions going the other way, and the state machine to keep track of it all will be huge.
There is a group at Caltech working on the low level transmission characteristics (layer 1 stuff) with a large amount of redundancy. Cyclical and longitudinal redundancy woven into the bitstream, multi-frequency phase encoding, all the coolest tech for RF fanatics.
When all this stuff comes together there will be at least one ISS and possibly some private orbital stations. Expect some privately funded space exploration missions as soon as it becomes possible for a corporation to buy some cheap boost to LEO and from there they will start to explore in the hopes of finding something to make their stockholders very rich. I've been predicting for years that cheap space missions will be the next "revolution" to replace all the hype around the internet.
I still want to control
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I can see it already, everyone clamoring to homestead a ".uranus"
A long long time back I worked for *cough*M$ for a while. JUST 6 MONTHS THOUGH!
:o)
Anyways I had this silly idea then and I emailed it to our friend BG.
I figured if you put a mirror on the moon you could store data in a 'light loop' by shinning a laser at it and turning it on and off (real quickly). Turned out you could actually store quite a bit of data (for that time) in such a loop with a pretty low latency.
So of course clouds would be an issue, and I suggested that two satelites would be easier to deal with. Just beam up your data and keep it in a laser loop between the satelites.
Well, I never got a response from Billy Boy, but sure enough, about a year later he announced his satelite launching plans.
Breace.
So far us humans haven't been able to control the modulation at anything near 10thz so we just do CW on it, which still gets a reasonable symbol rate.
The thing about that end of the electromagnetic spectrum is that it is extremely line-of-sight. You have direct experience with this, if you've ever seen a shadow.
Also even at much lower frequencies the line-of-sightness of radio becomes a problem. You will get blackouts from eclipses. We still don't have a way to get radio signals to the dark side of the moon.
You also run into the problem of even a perfect reciever not being able to detect a signal amongst the randomness of space, even with extremely directional antennas (you think they put dishes on those things cuz they look cool? :) you're attempting to radiate a signal to an area several million km^2 across and ten square meters of antenna gain area simply will not cut it.
Apparently this won't be a huge problem, since we are still recieving Voyager transmissions, but it might be an argument for lasers assuming the tight directional tolerances can be accomodated.
Why is everyone so hung up on these silly speed of light limitations? Don't you watch Star Trek? Just transmit the data over sub-space and all those pesky latency problems disappear. Sheesh... And while I'm blowing off steam, doesn't anyone realize that all you need to do is piggyback a transporter beam on a sub-space carrier wave and spacecraft become obsolete. It's so simple, and yet we're wasting all this time and money trying to develop propulsion systems. Today's scientists are so dense. Not Anonymous. Not a Coward. Simply too hungover to remember my password.
From a common quote file:
:-)
a um.html :-( check the babyl archives.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"
--Andrew Tanenbaum
I've lived this quote several times
This quote is relevent to linux users because it originated during some discussions between AST and Linus Torvalds. See:
http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/Linus_vs_Tanenb
although I no longer find the quote there
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
as useful for is it means a more cost effective way of communicating with deep space probes. One of the main problems NASA has had funding their probes is they need a massive communication system just to send rudimentary commands to them. The internet grew up on low bandwidth for years which lets many small systems act in an array to quickly transmit data, this is suprising to none of you. But a deep space network would mean it would cost a hell of alot less to send a mission into space because it could use a more robust communication system that was already in place. The Mars Pathfinder sent back it's data packaged as e-mail is packaged, but it was only a 9600bps connection that ended when Mars set relative to us. A similar system using a distributed network would mean we could communicate with a probe 24/7, even communicate with multiple probes all using the same system. This is way more cost and resource effective than what's used now.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Take some physics classes. Laser: electromagnetic radiation. Moves at: speed of light. Radio: electromagnetic radiation. Moves at: speed of light. A laser is coherent, and therefore goes in one direction and can be aimed perfectly at a point. It is NOT faster than radio as someone suggested, that's ridiculous. The only use of a laser in (wireless) communication would be to prevent the transmission from being easily intercepted. And there's a good way to do that: encryption.
Yes, you should. Please.
;-)
wow u too can see
Sorry if you got the impression I truly wanted to make money off of something that should always be free. I have the greatest respect for Jon Postel and all the amazing works he accomplished.
.earth domain, and although it wasn't official, it was fun to play with and use for training and playing. Vint Cerf is now working on a couple of projects to expand addressing and routing to the vagaries of space. All of this started a couple of years ago when NASA sent a web server up with the shuttle into orbit, and a new TLD .orb was created for the occasion. It was fun probing around the Root Name Servers to see the delegation to a NASA gateway, and for a short while it allowed zone transfers of the handful of records that existed.
.orb has gone away, and there is a working group trying to protect some of the future space naming schemes. Given the various attempts by various organisations to control the TLDs and naming in general, Jon Postel and now the people he inspired are working hard to keep future naming schemes open and available for everyone, not just a greedy corporate controlled WIPO or ICANNt.
For years there was a
Now
Sorry for the misunderstanding
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
This is a concept that some of us have been thinking about for some time - as networks get faster, there's a growing "latent" (pun intended) storage capacity in the bits that are in transit.
Do a little math: On a gigabit network with a quarter second latency (a reasonable assumption for a "nationwide" network), there is over 30 MB of storage in the link itself (one-way). At terabit and petabit speeds (and/or tremendous latencies), the buffer becomes quite sizable.
So far as I know, no one really makes direct use of the network as a storage buffer, but it could be done fairly easily, so long as you don't care a whole lot about getting your data back!
The closest thing to this in real use is the BFS (broadcast file system) used by cable headends to make files available to their digital settop boxes - they just dedicate a channel to continuously broadcasting the contents of the filesystem. Of course, three's a limit to how large such an FS can be as a practical matter, but settop boxes are small and stupid, so it works well for now. This is how things like the program guide and such are delivered in digital satellite TV systems, too.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems much of the debate about RRLFNs ultimately collapses to the age-old (in internet years) controversy over whether or not TCP keepalives are a good thing. (LFNs, pronounced "elephants" are Long Fat Networks - todays high latency networks - this wording is from the applicable RFCs, 1323 and its ilk. RRLFNs are Really, Really LFNs, something I just made up.)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
But where is the noise coming from? In space there is no friction and if the payload is delivered with light/laser is the any limit to the channel capacity? The Utilization of SATCom uplinks could/would hold back the channel capacity untill future developments in the multiplexing area are resolved. But the satellite to satwllite connection could be unlimited. On the topic of noise the only time we would have the noise problem is when the signal is leaveing and entering the atmosphere and of course when you start using multihops, but the digital signal would be cleaned up at each intermediate hop and a clean signal would be sent to the next destination. How many channels can you put across a beam/pulse of light/laser? Right now it is only determined by the hardware configuration transmitting the signal as light/laser technology is just starting to get tapped and understood. Just a few comments on this interesting subject so let me know what you think.
PalindenZ
I wonder if we could get the /. effect to take out Pulto.
When it absolutely, positively, has to be lost at the speed of light interplanetary tcp/ip!
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It seems that what is really needed is not just a 'protocol' per se, but more low level challenges like modulation schemes, error coding schemes, etc.
Then after finding other intelligence, we would need to set some bridge to convert their protocol to Interplanetary Protocol to TCP/IP... Of course address translation and the rest; possibilities are endless and fascinating.
Um, nothing about this research has to do with superluminal transport of information in a useful manner. Although EPR nonlocality (the phenomenon this research takes advantage of, IIRC) does give you 'instantaneous' action-at-a-distance, it does so in such a way that information *cannot* be transmitted; the 'receiving end' can't even tell when the action has 'occurred' until the 'senders' *tell* them.
-spc
If you look at their diagram, the "send data" line is the problem...
The "quantum" in quantum teleportation applies only to their discovery of how to teleport a particle and keep it's quantum states intact. However, one of the links on their page state that that might not necessarily be required to safely teleport a human.
You obviously don't understand quantum teleportation if you think it will let us have FTL communication.
is there a reason why lasers can't be used to communicate?
I could remember when you couldn't trust the government, and you could trust NASA. I did about four years of contract work for a NASA contractor in Alabama in the early 70's. Then, NASA was a very respected organization. Now, everything I read in the press from NASA is complete BS. I've seen in three articles quoting NASA people that claim TCP/IP is synchronous and therefore it has to replaced. Adrian Hooke (above) repeats the same lie. That "wait for an acknoledgemnt" is crap, and he knows it. The ACK windows are just too small and the packet header isn't large enough to specify larger ones in a backward compatible way. I guess NASA has signed on to the Gore "destroy the Internet agenda." I live in a city that has a university with a connection to the network Clinton is creating to replace the Internet, and about twice a week I get customer asking me why we still support the "old Internet" when they can use the "new Internet" at school. It's an amazing propoganda machine that can make people believe the greatest network in the world will stop functioning within 3-4 years. Yeah right.
Oh, ok -- I can't get xDSL service in my sorry little apartment, but people on other PLANETS get connected all day. That's real fair. Maybe I should just move to outer space, huh?
:) */
/* Prediction -- first response to this post will say "Yes, you should. Please."
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Channel capacity (the actual number of bits per second that can be transmitted reliably) is likely to be very bad. The high amount of noise and attenuation is going to make the signal to noise ratio very low, which means that very aggressive error control schemes will be needed -- which introduce redundancies and thus reduce the effective bit transfer rate.
Bandwidth doesn't tell you how fast data can be transferred. Channel capacity does -- which, according to the Shannon coding theorem, is proportional to both the bandwidth and signal to noise ratio.
let's see, by one report from NASA, Pluto is 4.4 billion kilometers away from Earth...that translates into 4 hours.
Hmm...methinks interplanetary quake matches would not be very practical!
...although, that's a better ping than I get right now...
Zilfondel
Today's English Lesson: Oxymorons
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