tachyon ethernet [0509.2003]

Somehow my mind wandered to the topic of Mars in my hike up stone mountain this morning. And I realized the red planet is going to have some REALLY crappy net lag.

According to the Mars Fact Sheet over at NASA, the planet is somewhere between 54.x10^6 and 401.3x10^6 kilometers away, depending on where we are in our orbits.

Now, light moves at 299,792 km/second. That means that if we shot a laser (or radio signal) at mars, it would take somewhere between 181 and 1338 seconds to get there.

Which means that if we somehow managed to build an interplanetary networking system that ran at the speed of light, there'd be a lag of 3 to 22 minutes on every packet sent.

And that's assuming we sent the message in a straight line. Really, things would get in the way of our signal - things like the sun, the earth's moon, the two moons around mars, and probably even Mercury and Venus from time to time. So we'd have to bounce the signal around on something like a network of satelites orbiting the sun.

Anyway, a hundred years from now, your great-grandchildren will be spoiled rotten with worldwide holophones and instant everything. Corporations will be created automatically by computers, filed with the state, IPO'd, and then sold off to conglomerates run by AI's in your wristwatch all in a matter of seconds... But it will take everybody half an hour just to say hi to their offworld neighbors.

So forget travelling to distant galaxies. The holy grail for faster-than-light research will be getting the phones to work.