Raising a Ladder to the Moon, Under the Sea | Hacker News Reader

Raising a Ladder to the Moon, Under the Sea

blogs.microsoft.com

Am I the only one who was disappointed that this wasn't an article about a plan to actually raise a ladder to the moon?

No, there are at least two of us!

make that three

And my axe!

https://what-if.xkcd.com/157/

This was a fun read!

> At worst, your hands and the surface of the pole will both be converted into exciting new forms of matter.

I love the book of What If?

Also this situation occurs in similar form but smaller scale in RAMA I.

I'm also agonizing in disappointment.

While this would indeed have been amusing, given the moon's orbit of the earth, how would this be possible?

A rope ladder hanging from the moon. (Not quite "raising", and ignoring a bunch of other details.)

I wonder if it got caught on a mountain or something equally robust it could stop the moon's orbit. I wonder what, aside from the tides, this would affect.

You would need quite the rope ladder in order to stop the moon's orbit.

Also, once you've stopped it, it would probably fall towards the Earth, because it is not at the right altitude to stay in geostationary orbit. That would be extremely bad.

Are you suggesting that we reel in the moon to geosynchronous orbit? Ignoring our obviously insufficient mastery of the art of ropemaking etc, that's a quite entertaining thought experiment. Tidal forces while moving the moon closer would knead our whole geology into utter chaos once, then later tectonics could stabilise much more than possible with the moon in its current orbit. The weather would also be quite funny, with those daily, hours-long eclipses hitting the same regions over and over again, causing dramatic gradients in energy influx.

We are already doing that (or rather, the moon is doing it to us), more by changing earth's rotation than by changing distance. We just need to wait a couple billion years for earth to be tidally locked to the moon (and not just the other way around like it is now).

Well I guess that makes the construction deadline a little easier to hit :P

> a couple billion years

What good does an eclipse if the Sun is all around? Or rather, we can commemorate that we'll have half a day long solar eclipses all year long.

Something like "The Cradle" from Niel Stephenson's Seven Eves maybe. (It basically just dangles several hundred feet above the ground)

Yea I was hoping this was about some new developments on a space elevator cable, but with the base being out in sea or something.

A space elevator would be amazing, but we don't have any materials strong enough yet to withstand the atmospheric sheer ... or a way to grab and pilot an asteroid anchor into orbit .. yet.

It’s a pity we don’t talk about ‘orbital ring systems’ more: many of the advantages of space elevators, but build-able with “off the shelf” superconductors, and steel & fiber optic cables.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring

Kim Stanley Robinson, is that you??? Reading your comment(whether you intended it this way or not), made me want to read 'The Mars Trilogy' again. If I remember, grabbing and piloting an asteroid above Mars was how they setup their space elevator.

This is my absolute favourite sci-fi trilogy of all time. The part of the series where he describes the most complex navigation A.I. ever developed by humanity, on a ship that clamped onto an asteroid, setup a factory that mined it for fuel to redirect its course ... it was so incredibly well written, researched and believable. I read it while drunk on a bus and the next morning I just had to go back and read that entire chapter again.

For those who haven't read it, it's a really good series.

I thought it would mention "The distance of the Moon", the first (and one of my favourites) short story from Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomics".

http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2007/07/ch_1_the_distance_...

If they meant that, they could have just said "literally". That would have clarified it.

Somehow, titles like this are acceptable (I don't see anyone asking for it to be changed). At the same time, more informative titles that people find irritating (because they seem clickbaity) apparently do warrant editing.

So we're supposedly in a fragile enough emotional equilibrium that we can't cope with clickbait titles, but obscure poetic titles are OK because... maybe because this is about elitism and intellectual snobbery, not about saving the user having to click to find out what the article is about?

I was also disappointed, but also a little concerned as to why MS would be publishing such an article.

No thread on submarine cables is complete without a link to Neal Stephensons classic "Mother Earth Mother Board" article:

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Hey @cstuder, THANK YOU for that link! I've been a Stephenson fan for decades, and had a Wired subscription for several years, yet somehow never came across this article till just now. Saved it to finish reading later, but had to come back and thank you. So good! :)

160Tbps on 8 fiber pairs is impressive. I wonder when we will get residential Tbit fiber, it should not be that far long into the future. Just think of the applications. In comparison a display cable "only" carriage a few Gbit of data per second.

I honestly can't think of any applications.

In the same way people bought new computers regularly until they got Fast Enough then sales really slowed, I think we've reached the same state for home-use comms.

BTW Shakespeare's full works uncompressed are about 5.4MB

I've often wondered about this. I get about 50mbps at home, and it's essentially more than enough for everything I do. Sure, having a faster connection speed would be great for big downloads, but I've never had any idea what I might do differently if I had gigabit fibre. Even something like 4k video streams fit in several tens of mbps, a family of 4 could all stream different 4k programmes with less than 200mbps between them.

I'm not sure if I'm just suffering a lack of imagination, and don't realise what I'm missing out on.

People who have really fast connections (gigabit): what do you do differently online that those of use with just "quite quick" connection don't?

If enough people had super-fast internet, downloads would get bigger. You could stream a desktop from a remote server for example. On a scale less threatening to software freedom, games could stream their art assets, allowing you to explore petabyte-sized worlds on consumer hardware. You could easily toss trained neural networks back and forth for whatever applications were dreamed up for them.

However, you're not going to see this if 99% of people have 50mpbs. In that world, you'll only see things that use 50mpbs.

Being able to subscribe to a high end gaming machine that always has the latest hardware and streams local is one option. Imagine always being able to play games in max resolution and settings with no hiccups?

Or maybe virtualizing presences more often. We could manufacture displays the size of walls right now - and presumably someday OLED that size will be affordable.

Who knows what sort of real time innovations could be made. Ie tracking objects at a small scale for large patches of land. Weather, wild life, idk. Remote controlled drone surveillance for wild fires.

Things I do with gbit fibre at home:

* Buying a game on steam and playing it very soon after.

* Buying a movie right before I leave on a trip and still being able to watch it on my iPad offline.

* Putting a video on a cloud hoster and not needing to wait until I can give a shareable link out.

It's all things you can do with 50mbit, but the speed difference really makes a difference. I rarely get the full gbit though, with steam (after I tinkered around a bit with regions) it's more like 60 megabytes per second for example.

I recently got 1.5Gbit fiber in Toronto (it was only $10 more than gigabit, and that was only ~$20 more than 250Mbit...)

Anyway, it hasn't been hugely transformative, but it alleviates a few headaches:

1) The biggest benefit is that uploads/downloads are symmetric. If you backup to the cloud, this is a big deal. All of the "definitely overnight" stuff can now be done in under an hour anytime.

2) I never worry about what anyone else in the house is doing. Stream all you want over wifi, there'll still be a full gigabit of bandwidth for my workstation. I don't have to mess with QoS or anything; there's literally just an oversupply of bandwidth. In fact, until I upgrade to 2.5 or 5gbit ethernet I literally can't saturate my connection...

3) I'm less likely to hoard stuff. I don't bother downloading steam games in advance and keeping them installed forever; I just download on demand and delete it after I'm done with it. This is currently allowing me to transition everything to SSDs.

It's funny that in threads on displays the comments usually say that we'll never have enough bandwidth for 8K streams, VR, instantaneous gaming etc. But in threads on bandwidth the comments say that they can't think of any applications.

>I honestly can't think of any applications.

real time holography

The network would be much faster then local hard-drives. So more data would be stored in the cloud, we are already seeing this transition now because even 10Gbe is faster then most hard drives. With a Tbit network it would be many times faster to load from the network then to load from the computer's own memory. Everything would probably be sent via the network if it weren't for latency. RAM still has some orders of magnitude (nano vs micro) better latency then networks. I'm sure latency can be improved though, even for wireless.

As for applications, we will definitively get virtual reality (VR) like in sci-fi movies, with very high res imaging and IO. There are already some crude VR devices and applications, but the market is still tiny. Being able to stream interactively directly to a VR device via the network, to every household - it would suddenly become a huge market.

As for file sharing, we would probably ask the network "who has hash-of-file" and the closest device would send it.

Or for search, you would specify a category, then query all databases listed under that category simultaneously. No need for a central index. Or something like grep "Under the Sea" com.tech.news.* and everything would be downloaded, searched and discarded if not matched.

Reading this just gets me down. I wouldn't mind if these were phrased as questions but no, we get blanket assertions.

> The network would be much faster then local hard-drives.

Figures? Are you distinguishing between bandwidth and latency? (no you aren't). How long are reads/writes going to take compared to a local disc: HDD seek times ~ 10 milliseconds, SDD in the microseconds. Speed over a network to 'the cloud' - tens of milliseconds (try pinging BBC from the UK, ~22 milliseconds. Example.com is 98 MS).

> 10Gbe is faster then most hard drives.

is 1 Gig/sec, approx. A couple of SSDs will match that in theory, in practice I doubt you'll get anything like saturation from a distant datacentre

> With a Tbit network it would be many times faster to load from the network then to load from the computer's own memory

OMG. C?

> and everything would be downloaded, searched and discarded if not matched

OMG redux. I'm no network guy but do you think tying up dozens of routers with multi-gigabytes of data you're going to discard, is free? efficient in energy or time?

Some reading matter.

<https://dzone.com/articles/latency-numbers-everyone-should-k...

<https://www.cloudways.com/blog/how-server-location-affects-l...

That kind of response would be OK if it asked questions, expressed a knowledge of the limits of their knowledge, I'd be ok with that and pointing the asker to relevant material but as it stands, as in that famous quote, it isn't even wrong.

(2017)

Here's an overview of all submarine cables: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

> ... establishes a faster and stronger telecommunications link not only to Europe, but to the next billion internet users that will come from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

I hate corporate PR so much for things like this. What's the point of talking about Asia? Data to/from Asia goes mostly trough the Pacific Ocean, not through Spain.

India, Iran, and the Middle East are also parts of Asia, and it might feasibly be faster to transmit data through the Atlantic than the pacific to get to those places.

Why it goes up to Bilbao instead of only to Galicia or Portugal? That will be shorter.

I thought that too, but looking at the map there are no other transoceanic cables to Portugal, so maybe there are deep holes off that coast.

Landing cable in an area where the largest waves in the world are routinely seen is very 'challenging'.

I think we'll some form of power link going from UK -> US during our lifetime, maybe via Iceland/Greenland so we can utilise the excess geothermal energy from Iceland.

What makes you think that's a possibility? Power transportation over long distances is lossy and thus very expensive.

It is lossy _now_ and very expensive _now_. I think what the poster was saying was such barriers may be surmountable in time.

I work in subsea power cables, AC transmission is not efficient, HVDC transmission is efficient for long distances. India has HVDC links 1500km long. I don’t understand the ‘lossy’ description, any energy transfer loses energy, when dealing with utilities it is either acceptable or not. HVDC is proven long distance transmission technology.

There is a subsea hvdc link in the early planning stage between Iceland and the U.K. I think it is more likely the financing of the project is not arranged yet than the technology.

The cost of these links is generally cheaper than a new build power station of a similar capacity, so when you can transfer excess generation it becomes cost effective to build.

AC Power transmission is not efficient over long distances without rectification.

HVDC Power transmission already has links >1500km onshore. Offshore links are more expensive to build but I don’t think there are massive difference in losses (to the point where they are not worth building anyway). European countries are already connected by subsea HVDC links 500km long.

There is a planned cable between Iceland and the U.K. the costs of construction are offset against currently wasted generation, so they can be built at a comparable cost to modern renewable energy, and then they open up an energy trading market that will add to the money made through generation.

Old article...please add (2017) to title

>Today, September 22, 2017, ...

Yet spain still lags behind most other countries in terms of internet connection speeds.

Why didn't they explain the need for peanut butter? Food supplies for the crew?

They did:

> It’s therefore perhaps not a surprise that the laying of the Marea cable involved not only the latest in fiber optic cable and repeater stations, but also 11,000 meals.

> This too required a variety of supplies – including 632 jars of peanut butter.

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