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The Internet

Vint Cerf Talks About The "Interplanetary Internet" 169

Posted by timothy from the no-intelligent-life-down-here dept.
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.
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Vint Cerf Talks About The "Interplanetary Internet" More

Vint Cerf Talks About The "Interplanetary Internet"

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  • Of course this brings up the obvious question... When do we get to start instant messaging all the little green men? :) ( No, I don't mean the RIAA here... )

  • sigh.. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    so now i can truly say they'll have broadband on mars before i get it.

  • Already done? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rainier Wolfecastle ( 591298 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @05:43PM (#4223546)
    Well, accoring to this one documentary [imdb.com] I saw, TCP/IP is already in use on at least one other planet.
    • What?

      Surely it was Appletalk or something, which is why everyone seemed to be using Macs...

      Otherwise everyone would have netstumbled their wifi network and slashdotted them out of the sky :)

      • AppleTalk over IP.

        No, wait, that wasn't until OS 9, ID4 was 1996....

        Maybe he just FTPed the thing to them. Yeah that must be it.

        ahhh to tired for funnies

    • Re:Already done? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dwonis ( 52652 )
      From net/ipv4/tcp_timer.c:

      Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum possible RTT. I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP to talk to the University of Mars.

  • Interplanetary Internet means.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @05:44PM (#4223559)
    Interplanetary Internet means intergalactic porn. The triple breasted whore of eroticon six will have her poor web server slashdoted.

    • 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

    • SWM computer nerd from Earth, Sol seeks SF from anywhere else. Humaniod appearence a plus. Please contact CrazyDuke@hardup.net.us.earth.sol

      (Don't mod me off topic for your not getting the humor.)
    • "Double the number of penis's you have, then add 3 inches!!!"

      "Bill Gates is paying everyone 5 galactic creds for every email you forward to another planet!"

      "see the galactic famous trisexuals!!"

      "Hi, I am the spouse of an important king on omacron 6. I need to transfer some money off world....."

      I would put up with spam from an galactic empire. Its a small price to pay to be part of an galactic empire, that consists of more then just the human race. Unless they want to devour us.
  • So now its going to be an 17 year old...

    Congrads... Reminds me of anti-counterfieting of currency... This bill should take them at least 18 months to duplicate.... 3 months later you start to see the fakes.

  • Sheesh! (Score:4, Funny)

    by MxTxL ( 307166 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @05:46PM (#4223578)
    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... :)

    • Re:Sheesh! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Pius II. ( 525191 ) <PiusII@nospAM.gmx.de> on Monday September 09, 2002 @06:33PM (#4223925)
      In net/ipv4/tcp_timer.c:tcp_retransmit_timer in Linux 2.3.99pre6,
      there's a comment lines 590-604 saying:
      /* Increase the timeout each time we retransmit. Note that
      * we do not increase the rtt estimate. rto is initialized
      * from rtt, but increases here. Jacobson (SIGCOMM 88) suggests
      * that doubling rto each time is the least we can get away with.
      * In KA9Q, Karn uses this for the first few times, and then
      * goes to quadratic. netBSD doubles, but only goes up to *64,
      * and clamps at 1 to 64 sec afterwards. Note that 120 sec is
      * defined in the protocol as the maximum possible RTT. I guess
      * we'll have to use something other than TCP to talk to the
      * University of Mars.
      *
      * PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once
      * implemented ftp to mars will work nicely. We will have to fix
      * the 120 second clamps though!
      */

      Found on http://www.wcug.wwu.edu/lists/netdev/200005/msg000 34.html

      The guy in the post proposes a 240 second clamp as upper limit, but I guess that wouldn't really help with this special problem... :-)

    • Re:Sheesh! (Score:3, Funny)

      by moosesocks ( 264553 )
      The scary part of that is that I've had worse pings than that on terrestrial servers on my 56k.
    • Of course, given most IRC sessions, an average 11700 ping will just seem like 'yet another potty break'

    • Re:Sheesh! (Score:2, Funny)

      by saskboy ( 600063 )
      I was going to make a similar remark about my highspeed loading pages on earth is bad enough, without having to wait about 14 minutes for my request to be responded to.

    • FTL Communications (Score:5, Funny)

      by sam_handelman ( 519767 ) <samuel DOT handelman AT gmail DOT com> on Monday September 09, 2002 @06:41PM (#4223977) Journal
      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, [quantumfields.com] 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.
      • 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.

        Sure: If you receive an ACK to a packet you haven't sent, put it into a buffer. Each time you're about to send a packet, check to see if you've already received an ACK for it. If you have, adjust the window as apppropriate and don't send the packet.

        • Re:FTL Communications (Score:5, Funny)

          by Dreamweaver ( 36364 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @08:53PM (#4224683)
          If you have, adjust the window as appropriate and don't send the packet

          Naughty, naughty. Still need to send the packet or you generate a causality loop. You already received the response for the packet you're about to send, you see. If you don't send it, then what was the response to?

          It's bad enough having inexperienced coders leaving memory leaks and infinite loops lying around; now we'll have reality leaks and causal loops to watch out for, too. "Woops, I forgot a semicolon and now French people speak German..."

      • FTL Travel is probably never going to be a reality

        Do people NEVER learn? You should NEVER speak in infinitives. You will ALWAYS be proven wrong.

        Traveling faster than light is impossible.... Just as impossible as the 4-minute mile, 70MPH travel, faster than sound travel, space travel, etc.

        NOTHING is impossible for people, unless they limit themselves. (You will notice how I speak about people in the third person {:-> )

        want to suggest changes to TCP/IP that would allow you to handle when acks arrived before the message they acknowledge has been sent?


        Quantum Ack... This feature is already in IPv6. Unfortunately, it looks like it would be easier to change the physics of the universe than to get people to leave IPv4.

        Besides, addressing this issue in TCP/IP should come second. First we have to address it when it happens in our overclocked processors.

        http://bbspot.com/News/2000/5/clock_rift.html
      • Careful. FTL communications are not "probably possible." Definitely not! About the best you could say is "well... um... since we haven't stretched the bounds of the theory, we should try all possibilities before discounting them."

        Did you read the paper that you quoted? It basically said "well... theory says that FTL communication isn't possible using quantum correlations... but the theory could be wrong!" Yes, it's true, the theory could be wrong - and the same could be said for any number of things, but it's not where I'm going to place my money.

        No one - read, no one has managed to send information faster than light. They've managed to collapse EPR states, they've managed to distort a photon's wavepacket such that a significant portion of it arrived faster than light would, but no one has managed to send information yet, because all of these experiments have the side caveat: no, we can't send information this way - but it's still interesting to see what we can do!
    • A little maths problem there. Even at conjunction, you're talking round trip times from Earth to Mars of 500 s.
    • I saw a presentation from some guy about Interplanetary Internet (might have been called Interplanetary Network at the time), and found that their proposed DNS scheme was a little bigger than marsrover.co.mars.

      Think more along the lines of marsrover.olympusmons.mars.sol.

      The .sol bit made me laugh - what are we going to do when we set this thing up between galaxies eh? (additionally, ping times would be bad)

      Steve.
      • Actually, last time I checked, they had divided up DNS because they realized the problems that Earth-based DNS was having - namely, companies using things like "france.ibm.com" instead of "ibm.com.fr" - people want the TLD to stay the same.

        So they split it up into a domain name, and a location identifier - that is, "mars.ibm.com, mars.sol". This is easily extendable to other galaxies, although there's no real need - parent stars will always be uniquely identified, I imagine. But "mars.ibm.com, mars.sol.milkyway" still sounds fine.
  • So this is the protocol they used in Independence Day [imdb.com]? And I've always wondered why the aliens were using TCP/IP.
  • Come on guys, Worldcom? [worldcom.com]
  • Just wait till the RIAA goes inter-galactic.
    • agreed... the next thing you know were going to find ourselves involved in intergalactic lawsuits that state

      "the lawsuit is based upon the stated copyright violation of mars orbital satelites 3,4, and 5. said satelites, whos orbital speed and trajectory are an exact duplicate of several earth-orbital satelites are violating the artistic integrity of said earth satelites. under intergalactic law, no two orbital patterns can be duplicated without the express permission of the originating orbital satelite."

      this of course would be followed by several pay-as-you-go networks, where for a small fee each satelite would have the right to use the orbital pattern of previous satelites, assuming that all royalties have been duly paid.

      --Stupidity should be as painful as Windows.
    • the tighter they grip - the more interplanetary internet warez sites will slip through their fingers.
  • 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.
  • Instead of worrying about an "Interplanetary Internet" how about if Vint Cerf spends some time cleaning up ICANN and making it less of a corrupt, scumbag organization.
  • 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.

    "...and we're collaborating with Worldcom [wcom.com] because we want headlines saying:

    Profits From Interplanetary Internet Exceed Wildest Expectations
    "Hot Stock! Buy Now!" Say Analysts

  • Because 15 year old kids are all about taking over Mars! That's nonsense; I was once a fifteen year old. All I cared about was getting the newest issue of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition (feat. Tyra Banks) or later on, Maxim. And some privacy. :)

  • *sob* Willis gets fired. (Score:3, Funny)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @05:53PM (#4223649) Journal
    Now we can just /. all the approaching asteroids.
  • "Mars needs IP" or "IP on Mars"?
  • If there really IS intelligent life on other planets, I suppose it won't last long after being confronted with a broadband connection full of the products of Earth's LACK of intelligent life...

  • Built-in security (Score:4, Funny)

    by fireboy1919 ( 257783 ) <rustyp AT freeshell DOT org> on Monday September 09, 2002 @05:55PM (#4223665) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • 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, ...)
    • Except Uranus. I hear they're using unpatched IIS servers there
      I know I'll get modded down for this, but I can't resist...

      ...are you saying there's holes in Uranus?

  • Vint apparently is still trying to find some justification for moving to IPv6. Oh yes, with inter-gallactic internet we'll surely run out of the valid address space available in IPv4. I'm finally convinced IPv6 is the answer.
    • Well... think about nanotechnology. If you had 1000 machines in a cubic inch, IP space would run out quickly even without going to mars.

      IPv6 is definitely needed.
      • 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.
  • Sonar internet link to sub oceanic inhabitants. fish.net?
  • We need subspace Ethernet. That would let us play UT with our Martian neighbors. I wonder if communicating via gravity would be possible. Gravitational waves may travel only at the speed of light, but the effect of gravity is instantaneous. If the Sun were to disappear right now, we wouldn't see it disappear for another 8 minutes, but the Earth's orbit would change immediately.
  • This was already discussed here this past May [slashdot.org]. Thanks for posting it again -- we'll look forward to seeing it appear again in December!

  • Remeber your physics... (Score:4, Informative)

    by d.valued ( 150022 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @05:59PM (#4223699) Journal
    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..)

    • Quantum entanglement can't be used to send a signal faster than the speed of light, since there's no way to encode a message without collapsing the superpositions and breaking the entanglement.

      Sorry, try again.

      • what if you make it so that you make sure you are spinning all the 1s one way and all the 0s the other way, but don't know which way they will spin? if the spin depended upon a single "inverter" which decided which direction means a 0 and which direction means a 1. then the client could read the data and then the inverter.

        of course the direction of the 1s and 0s would have to be somehow dependent upon the inverter, but there is still uncertainty

        the inverter could be created in the same way as any entanglement situation is created

        within the next century, our current beliefs on superposition will most likely be disproven anyways
        • You can't "make" the 1s one way and the "0s" the other way. If you did, then they wouldn't be entangled, would they? You'd be forcing the message upon them.

          If you're talking about forcing the "1s" in one state before you even send them out, then you're encoding the message before you send it out, in which case, the message takes, well, the travel time of the package to the destination.

          You can't do it. It's really too bad that the EPR experiment and Bell's Theorem get so much air time. So many people get so excited about nothing.
    • 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.
    • This is also why caching servers would become very important.

      Stuff like Akamai, but on a planetary scale for most major sources (or just most commonly reffered sources).

      Would suck to be a bored mars colonist trying to surf the Earth web at night thou, all those old pages being un cached and stuff.
    • You make some good practical points, but you forgot the most important element:

      CACHING

      Better keep those cache expiration intervals high.
    • Philotic theory is Fiction! Quantum entanglement just doesn't work outside of certain sci-fi books

      • Re:Remeber your physics... (Score:4, Informative)

        by d.valued ( 150022 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @08:17PM (#4224516) Journal
        Let's get past Ender's Game for a minute.

        This isn't some sci-fi, pseudo-science. This is quantum physics we're talking about here. Unless you are one of the theorists, chances are you're a parrot. I'll readily admit I don't grasp most of it, since I'm not doing it full-time and most of the QP stuff gives me migraines on a bad day.

        However, what I mentioned casually in the article (with the thirty-second explantation) is Bell's Theorem. Link provided here [utoronto.ca], here [berlinet.de], here [ncsu.edu].

        Punch up Google, type in "Bell's Theorem", and enjoy stuff that makes your tiny little mind explode.
        • Unfortunately, your interpretation of Bell's Theorem is quite wrong.

          Bell's Theorem says that quantum mechanics is fundamentally right. Wave functions collapse instantaneously (barring a nonlocal hidden variable theory). That would seem to imply that we can send information faster than the speed of light, but that's not true - there's no information contained within the wavefunction itself. You can't send information. No. No chance. No way. No how. Go ahead. Try. You'll never be able to.

          "Things" travelling faster than the speed of light is not surprising. It is normal. Imagine two planets, say, 1 light year apart from each other. Now imagine you're thousands of light years away from them, perpendicular to the line joining the two planets. Now you shine a biiig flashlight on them, and wave it back and forth between the two planets. Now think about the shadow (or "lack of flashlight") - passing back and forth. Do the math - it's going to be going back and forth at several times the speed of light.

          Is this a problem? Hell no. There's no information in that "shadow". There's no way for planet A to use that shadow to transmit information to planet B (without sending it to you first, which would... well... defeat the point).

          Bell's Theorem basically says that the wavefunction is the quantum analogue of the magnetic vector potential - a quantum "shadow". Yes, it propagates faster than the speed of light. No, this isn't a problem. The EPR experiment, and others similar to it that Bell's Theorem addresses, cannot be used to send FTL messages. If they could, you'd be damned sure we'd already be doing it!
    • 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.

  • Not really the interplanetary internet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rupert ( 28001 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @06:00PM (#4223709) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

    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 /. here on Earth, but then there'd be Marsdot, Jupidot, Plutodot, etc. each catering to its own local community.
    • Well, if you figure that Google has the capacity to cache just about the whole 'net, it's not inconceivable that they could dump their archives and have them sent up somewhat periodically.

      But then again, even at these distances, while you would have huge latency, you could still have pretty high bandwidth. It probably wouldn't be too hard to maintain a spider that would run around and collect a local cache of the whole net. Any page requests hit the local cache and are relatively fast. The spider would take advantage of forsight to pull pages people are likely to look at (or even ALL pages) and the 42 min orund trip would be eliminated.
  • It's quite a simple problem, really:

    RFC20063: IP-over-Ansible.
  • You mean there was nothing more news worthy to discuss on that day?
  • Finally, practical application of this "ansible" thing the military developed.

  • It looks like we'll soon be able to FTP the University of Mars...

  • 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!

  • ET (Score:3, Funny)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @06:38PM (#4223959) Homepage
    ET Ping Home. ET Ping Home.

  • Will the Interplanetary Net support . . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by StefanJ ( 88986 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @06:40PM (#4223966) Homepage Journal
    . . . the MIME types suggested in RFC1437?

    http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1437.html
  • "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."

    At
    By
    About
    To
    About
    With

    I think this sentence is suffering from a severe bout of prepositional indigestion.

  • Security is nice, but hopefully they will be doing something so some script kiddie doesn't DDOS a craft into Safe Mode.

  • The Poor Pigeons! (Score:4, Funny)

    by tarsi210 ( 70325 ) <nathan@nathan[ ]lle.com ['pra' in gap]> on Monday September 09, 2002 @06:46PM (#4224007) Homepage Journal
    I guess the birds [faqs.org] will need tiny spacesuits and rocket packs to make it back and forth.

    Incoming interstellar hen!
  • I have two minor issues with this:
    1. 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."
    2. 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.

    • Re:Two small, minor issues (Score:4, Insightful)

      by krokodil ( 110356 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @09:54PM (#4224937) Homepage
      1. 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."

      Before sending people we will send bots. And to download information from bots TCP/IP may be good choice.

      • Before sending people we will send bots. And to download information from bots TCP/IP may be good choice.

        ... have sent bots, actually.


        The whole idea of this isn't some science fiction idea of humans on Mars. The real reason is that the DSN (Deep Space Network) is overloaded. It's going to have to be replaced soon, and NASA's thinking, well, why not do it with something that's extendable?
  • Well I hope Vint can pull something good off for WorldCom, or MCI or whatever they are going to call it these days. My stock sucks! (and my severence package sucked too) :-)

    Kevin
  • Just wanted to point that out.
  • "We're building in security from end to end."
    Why can't more programmers think this way?
    • Why can't more programmers think this way?

      Well, Cerf's already had the experience of developing TCP/IP, which emphatically didn't have any useful security built in. Maybe this time he'll do a little better. Or maybe he'll get a clue and simply adopt something like DECnet or SNA which really does have protocol-level security and robustness built in.
  • Brings new meaning to an old BAD movie
  • 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.
  • Now Bob Zubrin will cite unlimited bandwidth as a reason to go to mars.

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I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.

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