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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

As other commenters noted, it's fascinating that no matter how advanced the networking technology progresses, we'll always have a variation of "sneakernet"[1] to bypass the limitations of the network. The sneakernet just evolves from floppies to 45-foot shipping containers.

If humans later colonize Mars and want to have the full 50-terabytes copy of Wikipedia in the biosphere, it's faster to send some harddrives as a rocket payload on a 6 month journey rather than try to transfer it via the 32kbps uplink[2] which would take ~500 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

[2] http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communicationwithearth/data...

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A screenshot of Tanenbaum's "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" argument with the context around it from his book.

http://imgur.com/a/qi4BP

A thing bothers me regarding that calculation. Shouldn’t the time it takes to write the data to all those tapes be taken into account? I.e., if you’re using tapes to transport data, your real bottleneck is your tape drive write speed.

Perhaps an artifact of the time period. In the 90's, you likely already did backups to LTO/Ultrium tapes daily. So the time was considered already sunk cost.

Or use X-ray communications:

http://www.space.com/34824-nasa-x-ray-tech-deep-space-commun...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063277

Even with x-rays theoretically providing a future 1 Gbps link to Mars, the underlying issue is that the growth of data vastly outpaces the advancements in speed technologies.

In other words, by the time x-ray communication is a reality to the Mars colony, we'd want to copy 50-petabytes (~15 years transfer[1]) or 50-exabytes (~15000 years transfer). The 6-month rocket journey is still faster than those scenarios.

[1]http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(50*10%5E15)+%2F+((1*10...

Multiple laser beams? That would scale.

Adding a laser beam scales linearly, both in speed and cost. The amount of data we generate, store, and use scales exponentially.

yes but as long as the laser beam can carry absurd amounts of data, that linear coefficient is just fine. Nobody needs to sync trillions of cat videos (which is the source of exponential growth) between Mars and Earth.

No, the nature of technology building upon itself is the source of exponential growth. As long as storage and processor technology continues to improve - and it will - we will find uses for that space, and network technology will need to keep up.

I keep thinking this will stop because there's a human limit to what we can generate.

But then I install another 60 GB game and realize not any time soon...

Yep. And as I processors reach their ceiling, I imagine more effort being put on precomputed scenarios so that they become more or less glorified look up machines with instructions stringing them together.

I think the better way of phrasing this is that the growth of data vastly outpaces our ability to implement advancements in speed technologies.

I just realized how much of a limited resource the Mars -> Earth internet connection is going to be in the future. It'll need to be limited to only absolutely necessary communications for a long time.

Assuming we get enough people on Mars, they'll have their own internet over there.

Startup Idea: Intersteller Intermodal Container Services. If you're the first, you'll make the money.

relevant xkcd https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

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