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.
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.
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.
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)?
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
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”
For internet between Mars and Earth you have to deal with a peak latency of twenty minutes, forty for duplex. I don’t think TCP/IP is designed in any way to deal with that. You’d have to come up with a translational protocol with TCP/IP buffers on either end. I don’t think it would be that difficult to engineer in terms of current technology.
Another issue is link speed and bandwidth, the distance causes signal degradation. You have to run transmission speeds lower. It might be possible to use repeater satellites to alleviate issues. That’s commonly done on Earth bound communications.
There is a way to create data links that don’t rely on RF using quantum entanglement. It would be zero latency across all of space. It’s sci-fi tech, but it’s hugely more feasible than things like warp drives and transporters. We’re already developing tech that utilizes quantum states .
