Author Topic: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony  (Read 18981 times)

Offline KelvinZero

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #20 on: 06/13/2014 12:41 pm »
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_archiving

After all, you could view the Mars colonists as "future researchers". They happen to only be 40 minutes in the future.


Offline gosnold

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #21 on: 06/13/2014 06:18 pm »
Are there publicly available estimates of the volume of data stored by Facebook/Google cache/etc? And of the power needed per user to support these services?

Offline braddock

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #22 on: 06/13/2014 07:46 pm »
A single hard drive today can hold about one half of the text in the Library of Congress. 

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.

On a single 1 terabyte hard drive we ship:

-All of Wikipedia in 37 languages
-Full maps of the world down to street level worldwide
-500 hours of instructional video
-35,000 e-books
-most of the worlds open source software, including source code.

That fits in about 650 GB.  Fits in your shirt pocket.

http://internet-in-a-box.org

By the time we get to Mars the amount we can bring as a cache would be mind boggling.

Offline cryptoanarchy

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #23 on: 06/14/2014 03:35 am »
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.    A person surfing the web could surf for years with just that content.  What would not work well are sites like Facebook which are bandwidth heavy and require more realtime data.  The internet on mars would be great for serious stuff and education but bad for most recreational surfing. 

Communication to and from earth would be slower, but still very useful for email and text conversations.  Just no real time video of course. 

Does not seem like a problem to me.  :)




Offline sheltonjr

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #24 on: 06/14/2014 01:02 pm »
Once you get rid of the porn and shopping,  their isn't that much on the internet anyway. 

I wonder if Amazon prime members get free shipping to Mars?

Electronic products would work.

Offline kerlc

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #25 on: 06/14/2014 01:49 pm »
what about local equivalents to Facebook?

If martian population grows high enough, it's bound to happen. It might even be prefered to earthly facebook, what with the ability of instant messages and whatnot.
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Be patient people, rockets are hard.

Offline Burninate

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #26 on: 06/14/2014 02:02 pm »
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.
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.
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.
Such projects will always be an impoverished subset of the human enterprise, because they must accommodate our archaic legal system, under which everything is copyrighted-by-default, and a conservative legal stance is to never sing 'happy birthday'.  Library Genesis, the most recent e-book monument built by those who do not respect copyright, has ~30TB of books and papers, and no audio or video.

We can pack 4TB into a 2.5" SSD now, and 256GB into a microSD form factor.  By the time interplanetary internet caching becomes a problem worth spending a million dollars on, we'll be able to send 100 petabytes in one ISS payload rack, depending on how long Moore's Law holds.  The limitation, rather, is whether we'll be able to subvert our legal system sufficiently to allow the content to be shipped up there - or to be shipped to the developing world, for that matter.
« Last Edit: 06/14/2014 02:18 pm by Burninate »

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #27 on: 06/14/2014 05:37 pm »
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_archiving

After all, you could view the Mars colonists as "future researchers". They happen to only be 40 minutes in the future.
A heck of a lot of web content is already geographically cached for lower latency access over cheaper links. This is why Google has lots of data centers all over the world. For the vast majority of content like youtube and wikipedia (i.e. stuff that can tolerate a 30 minute delay), this would work just fine (with modifications). Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network

When you access Google or youtube or netflix other major websites, you're very often accessing a geographically close data center, not the same data center that web surfers in Timbuktu are accessing. So with a large enough population (i.e. so a content delivery network would invest in locating some servers at Mars), accessing the Internet wouldn't be that different than it is right now. The only difference is that things like Twitter and this web forum would be a few dozen minutes out of sync. Also, ISPs already do a lot of local caching already. Disk is really cheap, about 2-3 cents per gigabyte (which is cheaper than typical bandwidth, at least for the end user) and costs about $500-1000/kg, so probably cheaper than the cost of transport to Mars by the time this is relevant... by which time they'll likely use just all SSD and even cheaper and more data-dense.
« Last Edit: 06/14/2014 05:47 pm by Robotbeat »
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Offline IslandPlaya

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #28 on: 06/14/2014 05:52 pm »
Will need to be error-corrected/resistant to radiation on the the trip/stay there.
Will double at least the storage costs...

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #29 on: 06/14/2014 05:58 pm »
Will need to be error-corrected/resistant to radiation on the the trip/stay there.
Will double at least the storage costs...
Nah, just wipe 'er clean and send the data via laser (cheapest way) when you get there. The cache will be updated with new content as needed.
Chris  Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

Offline IslandPlaya

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #30 on: 06/15/2014 12:55 am »
No. It will be cheaper to send the NAND dies. Multiple ones for redundancy than set up the 2-way laser coms.
Not that the coms shouldn't be set up anyways like....

Offline ThereIWas3

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #31 on: 06/15/2014 07:57 pm »
The larger your cache of information, the more clever you have to be in finding what you want.  Google throws a lot of compute power at this problem, and has several dozen data centers around the world.  They were working on modular ones that fit in a 40 ft storage container.  With a lot of unstructured information, you need to have built lots of secondary and teriary indexes, and these can be larger than the basic data itself.  Without those indexes your search times go up greatly.

Still, until a Martian civilization grows beyond a couple thousand people, the number of searches per second is not likely to be high, and these days you can cram a lot of computes with their storage into a box of 0.1 cubic meters, as long as it is shielded from that cosmic radiation, and you can cool it.  Low voltage, super tiny, integrated circuits (like we all have in our cellphones) are easily disrupted by radiation.  So either you shield them really well (weght, bulk, etc), or settle for 10-year or 20-year old technology which is much more robust at the nano-scales of semiconductor physics (weght, bulk, and more power and cooling).

Offline cryptoanarchy

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #32 on: 06/16/2014 03:07 am »
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.
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.

Space rated hardware is going to store a heck of a lot less then standard products but I was going for a low number because well curated 10TB is a huge amount of data.  That being said 1PB would be doable but not something that would fit in a 100lb space rated box.  . 

Most of the stuff on youtube by size is basically unwatched.  99% of watched videos make up 30 percent of the storage.  Of the remaining many are repeats (though the multiple copies are watched independently).  If you took out all of the videos with less then 10k views youtube would be much smaller. 

When I said text I meant text transmissions not archiving the entire internet. 

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #33 on: 06/16/2014 03:37 am »
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. 10PB wouldn't be too hard. As far as mass, you can get 1TB SSDs that have a mass of about 8.5grams apiece, so 10PB worth of SSDs (raw) would have about as much mass as one typical American.
« Last Edit: 06/16/2014 03:38 am by Robotbeat »
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To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

Offline KelvinZero

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #34 on: 06/16/2014 09:57 am »
I wonder if the solution is closely related to web archiving:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archiving
A heck of a lot of web content is already geographically cached for lower latency access over cheaper links.
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.

Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #35 on: 06/16/2014 01:29 pm »
To the OP:  Verizon or Comcast.
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline guckyfan

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #36 on: 06/16/2014 03:30 pm »
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.

I think a proxy server on earth could help with this problem.

Offline Mikesicles

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #37 on: 07/15/2014 01:51 pm »
It is possible to just allow the colonists to download sites and information to the local information hub based on desire instead of trying to store the entire non porn content of the internet on mars

Offline Robert Thompson

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #38 on: 07/15/2014 02:52 pm »
Reverse of OP
I wonder if one of the first products and services that Mars could offer would be applications, software, scientific programming. Ship code back to large client datasets on earth. No, you would not go to Mars *to be a computational researcher. But you could go to Mars *and retain, on top of the other technical and engineering prowess required of an astronaut, an Earth-marketable skill with which you could work from home.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-25/computer-controlled-trucks-taking-over-in-pilbara-mining-wa/5412642
(Check ~7:20 about automation being developed in remote Australian mining country)
« Last Edit: 07/15/2014 02:57 pm by Hernalt »

Offline ThereIWas3

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Re: Internet Access for the New Mars Colony
« Reply #39 on: 07/15/2014 07:40 pm »
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.

Those Arduinos do not last very long, and that is in LEO.   Consumer grade computers  would have to be shielded all the way to Mars, as the damage to the crystalline structures can happen even when powered off.

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