I think Martian colony will have for long, long time more pressing concerns than lack of Internet.
It won't be hard to use laser links between satellites (of Mars, Earth, and the Sun) to get high data rates. But the latency will be high.We'll do what we do on Earth -- use caching. We can have a data center on Mars or in the vicinity of Mars that caches the most popular web sites and caches a search index. Probably Google will be willing to cache a portion of its search index there. E-mail, of course, will work just fine. With proper caching, news sites, Facebook, discussion fora, etc. could be made to work almost as well. Real-time chats won't, of course, and neither will real-time games.This will be very important psychologically for the Mars colonists.
I would suspect that the most popular sites based upon searches by residents of mars would be updated to a local mirrored server with updates using bandwidth unused by higher priority communications with the rest of the solar system. You would probably have two types of searches. One would find info on the cached sites on the servers. After the results are pulled up, the user would probably be prompted if they want to extend the search to earth or other locations with a significant lag for the results.
Quote from: ChrisWilson68 on 06/03/2014 10:20 pmIt won't be hard to use laser links between satellites (of Mars, Earth, and the Sun) to get high data rates. But the latency will be high.We'll do what we do on Earth -- use caching. We can have a data center on Mars or in the vicinity of Mars that caches the most popular web sites and caches a search index. Probably Google will be willing to cache a portion of its search index there. E-mail, of course, will work just fine. With proper caching, news sites, Facebook, discussion fora, etc. could be made to work almost as well. Real-time chats won't, of course, and neither will real-time games.This will be very important psychologically for the Mars colonists.Absolutely. I too believe, this is important, especially in the beginning to give the feeling of not being cut off.
Quote from: guckyfan on 06/04/2014 03:46 amQuote from: ChrisWilson68 on 06/03/2014 10:20 pmIt won't be hard to use laser links between satellites (of Mars, Earth, and the Sun) to get high data rates. But the latency will be high.We'll do what we do on Earth -- use caching. We can have a data center on Mars or in the vicinity of Mars that caches the most popular web sites and caches a search index. Probably Google will be willing to cache a portion of its search index there. E-mail, of course, will work just fine. With proper caching, news sites, Facebook, discussion fora, etc. could be made to work almost as well. Real-time chats won't, of course, and neither will real-time games.This will be very important psychologically for the Mars colonists.Absolutely. I too believe, this is important, especially in the beginning to give the feeling of not being cut off.If you can't go without instant responses from friends and family back home, you're not the right stuff for a colonist.
Only a few decades ago, there was no internet. That didn't stop people from emigrating to another continent.
More accurately, it stopped millions from emigrating, but tens of thousands and eventually millions took the risk. In the early days, communications with people back on the old continent took months, and you were never sure the letters reached their destination. But a few hours lag in sending video and e-mail back and forth would be an insurmountable psychological barrier to colonists? Please... There are still locations on this planet that don't have access to internet. That doesn't stop people from living there.
Books are nice. They are generally fault tolerant, have long storage lifetimes during power outages, and they can keep the colony warm during times of distress or religious fervor.