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.
Be patient people, rockets are hard.
Without much work a server could contain 10TB of static internet data. This could include all of the video commonly watched on sites like youtube and most of the popular websites data to that point and lifetimes of educational material including video.
For a sense of scale, a couple years ago I started the Internet-in-a-Box project to deploy content to schools in undeveloped countries without inexpensive internet access.
Cute little problem. Conceptually most content on the web could be cached on the Mars side, eg youtube, wikipedia, new sites and so on, but modern content is not written that way and you can't ask every single website designer to cater to such a small population.I wonder if the solution is closely related to web archiving:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archivingAfter all, you could view the Mars colonists as "future researchers". They happen to only be 40 minutes in the future.
Will need to be error-corrected/resistant to radiation on the the trip/stay there.Will double at least the storage costs...
Quote from: scamanarchy on 06/14/2014 03:35 amWithout much work a server could contain 10TB of static internet data. This could include all of the video commonly watched on sites like youtube and most of the popular websites data to that point and lifetimes of educational material including video.OT, but - 10TB? Try 10PB. Those of us who have HTPCs know how little 10TB buys you. "All of the commonly watched video on sites like Youtube" is a very large set indeed - in 2012 uploads amounted to an estimated 76PB/yr. For PDF books, 10TB is a reasonably good number, catching a sizable subset of the existing jailbroken textbook corpus. For Internet text? Wholly insufficient. The Internet Archive passed 10PB scale two years ago.
Quote from: KelvinZero on 06/13/2014 12:41 pmI wonder if the solution is closely related to web archiving:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archivingA heck of a lot of web content is already geographically cached for lower latency access over cheaper links.
I wonder if the solution is closely related to web archiving:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archiving
I was just thinking of those webpages that don't finish loading until something has replied with a few bytes of information from your browser etc. I expect caching would mainly reduce bandwidth but not interfere with attempts to communicate to the server.. Otherwise you are stuck with viewing mars-friendly sites.
Doesn't have to be space-rated. People launch arduinos and cellphones into space and /operate/ them (need a good watchdog circuit). Just bury it under a few feet of soil when you get there, and you'll be good.
Once the first 100 (1,000, 10,000, more?) people settle on Mars, they will be nearly cut off from the Information Age. That will be a real downer. Of course they will have local, Mars, communication but no chatting with Earth. Text email only? Mars Google to Earth won't work very well and participating in NSF discussions will be very awkward.What can be done to improve the situation?Bring data on media to Mars for installation on the local Mars-net will work for archive data but how current can it be kept? What will the Mars-net look like, how will it be kept current how will a Scientist do data searches? Will the colonists just forget about surfing the Earth Internet?Other problems/solutions?
One method of accessing those types of websites will be working with someone on Earth. You tell them what you are looking for and they try to not just provide better results than a search engine does, but to follow the links and anticipate which ones you will find useful, and where you will go deeper into a site (or follow links), so that they can build a small cache of valuable information in a much shorter time for you.
You don't search the whole web when you do a google search, you're sending a request to the nearest Google data center which sends back the result. For a million person colony, Google would just have a few servers at Mars.
Oh well, sucks we wont get internet porn on mars. I guess our martian astronauts will just have to bring playboys like the Apollo astronauts did!
Quote from: bilbo on 08/19/2014 09:30 pmOh well, sucks we wont get internet porn on mars. I guess our martian astronauts will just have to bring playboys like the Apollo astronauts did!For a two year trip? They'll be improvising some alternatives on Mars in no time. What do they have to work with? If Home Office is breathing down their necks, they'll have to go all the way back to cave art and fertility statuettes :p
Quote from: high road on 08/20/2014 09:59 amQuote from: bilbo on 08/19/2014 09:30 pmOh well, sucks we wont get internet porn on mars. I guess our martian astronauts will just have to bring playboys like the Apollo astronauts did!For a two year trip? They'll be improvising some alternatives on Mars in no time. What do they have to work with? If Home Office is breathing down their necks, they'll have to go all the way back to cave art and fertility statuettes :pHow about women? It is going to be a Colony after all.