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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

Browsing the modern web would be a nightmare from Mars, with a 30-minute ping and all the HTTP back-and-forth that modern pages require.

I guess you would have to use an Earth-based remote desktop.

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I have been thinking recently that Mars and maybe the Moon would need to use asynchronous messages. Basically, email but with multiple message types.

For browsing the web, they would send a message requesting a page, and get back the messages for the page in 30 minutes. They would probably send a request for whole site instead of round-trips for links.

This means that interactive JavaScript sites would never work. There would need to be way to download app or web app that could send messages to update state. Or way to install local server that can sync with Earth.

> Browsing the modern web would be a nightmare from Mars

Getting website articles and other media via rss feeds would be easiest. Email and usenet style nntp, also.

There's been work done on protocols optimized for inter-planetary networks, taking into round trip times when it comes to retransmissions and windowing, etc. Gateways can be setup between those protocols and earth's tcp internet.

But every communication back and forth still takes many minutes. Interactive websites would take at least one round trip minutes for every request, every form submission, every javascript call to a back-end server, etc. Remote desktop solutions would encounter this same problem, too.

At the moment the fastest link to Mars is about 6 megabits per second. Presumably that could be scaled up quite a bit, but I assume bandwidth will be a consideration for a while, too.

Early on it will make sense to bring a lot of your own entertainment media and reference materials via thumb drive or other storage media, to have instant access and save bandwidth for other things.

With a fat enough pipe and big enough cache web browsing could be doable with push based caching.

Counterstrike or zoom meetings? Not so much.

That would still have a 30 minute ping. You should just have a Martian Internet and then sync up the two every few hours or something.

>You should just have a Martian Internet and then sync up the two every few hours or something.

the "internet" is just a network of computers. "sync up the two" would involve replicating the servers and coming up with some sort of consensus protocol. Needless to say, that's non-trivial to implement and needs to be done for each site individually. If there was a martian colony it might be economically feasible for some sites to do this, but if it's just a few astronauts the most feasible way of implementing internet browsing would be something like archive.today, where you send a url to some server on earth, the server runs a headless browser and takes a screenshot, and sends the captured contents back to mars/spacecraft.

The question is whether it will be like Usenet with nntp or a BBS with xmodem

It would have a 30 minute ping for rendering, but all the round trips required for loading the page would be a few orders of magnitude shorter.

Probably not possible for the first several years, with limited bandwidth. Maybe they could use sneakernet for periodic updates.

Most internet traffic will be predicted/generated by AI by then, so they'll only need to send a few tiny deltas.

You just need Martian internet infrastructure and banking. Those institutions can sync balances with earth based banks later behind the scenes.

We'd need a "Bank for Interplanetary Settlements".

...only to run into a page that drops a nasty overlay on your browser window because you have Adblock enabled.

Logging in to your bank account to pay the Mars mortgage would take like 4 hours.

Buffering... please wait

Maybe one day we’ll see relay stations in space. One spaced every x miles transmitting the internet from earth. Ping should be minimal.

The delay is from the time of flight of light between Earth and Mars. Relays can only add additional processing time without shortening that, though they could potentially help with signal integrity. You also can't just freely place a relay between earth and Mars and have it stay between them — both planets are orbiting the sun and the relay also would be, with a period that doesn't match either planet.

Cannot tell if /s, but just in case this was serious: light takes between 3 and 22 minutes to travel from Mars to Earth and back, which means that ping cannot be less than between 6 and 44 minutes depending on orbits.

Robust caching would help but still be nothing like what we experience on Earth (particularly the interactive portions of the web like, say, HN).

You forgot to include the fact that there is a point where mars is behind the sun, which makes for a period where the ping will be ~2 weeks.

Beyond line-of-sight (BLOS) communications are used all the time with satellites and other relays so people can communicate with others outside their immediate LOS. You need relays that extend the visibility of the planets with respect to each other. This is non-trivial, but not much harder than the work already going on to land things on Mars that requires (or desires) comms back to Earth.

Relay stations at a third location would fix this.

I choose to interpret this as humor. Funny joke! I laugh.

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