I get excited every time I hear about a possible habitable planet, but after 10 seconds I remember that this means nothing and will mean nothing for a few centuries as we won't be able to reach any other planet that's billions of kilometers away.
Luxury. Proxima Centauri is 40 trillion kilometers from here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infr...
The planet is ~10,000 times further away. Back of envelope puts the resolution at 250,000km. The earth is 12,000km in diameter. At 5.8x Earth mass and assuming similar density it would be a bit more than twice as wide and 25,000km diameter is easy to work with giving the planet a width of 1/10th of a "pixel". That's not nothing. In fact it's quite a lot relative to nothing. But it's still a long way from a well resolved image.
Oops. Forgot to apply the inverse square law. 10,000x further means resolving features of 10^10 greater area.
Sadly Proxima Centauri is 40,000 billion km away, so a bit further to go.
At 500m km/year our fastest probes would take 80,000 years to get there.
anyway given that their network was 100% switched, and "time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays."
I'm thinking it doesn't apply to email delivery to Proxima Centauri or basically most places.
on edit: though with a long enough distance to the destination it would be pretty close to speed of light as the various times to respond etc. would be negligible.
Learn from Admiral Grace Hopper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw
The speed of light in fiber optic cable is about 2/3 the speed of light, which is why SpaceX's Starlink will have a potential latency advantage over oceanic fiber optics.
It also gives good perspective on what's being thrown away when you add a single ms of latency through a router or a display. 186 miles at the speed of light. Many on HN don't get this, but this is why cloud gaming is perfectly feasible if we're running with low latency displays and inputs, low distance to the edge compute, and few routing hops.
https://www.airspacemag.com/space/hibernation-for-space-voya...
An unmanned mission would probably have to go even faster, and probably has to be a bigger craft with better on-board power supply (with backups) and a big communications array. Maybe it would even need similar craft following it after a while to form a chain of communications relays on their way out.
Whats more likely to happen, is ~500 years of unmanned space exploration before we even think about sending people out there.