HACKER Q&A
📣 knidarkness

What is the interplanetary communication future?


It's almost Friday evening and I was thinking a bit. Now we are approaching the space exploration era (hopefully) again. With SpaceX ambitious plans for reaching Mars as soon as 2024 (even lets say 2028 with all the delays) a new challenge will come.

Radio signals take about 3-5 seconds for a round trip between Earth and Moon. Much less for ISS. But with Mars it will be a matter of 6-44 minutes with a fairly "bad signal". And communications with other human beings (and of course getting access to the vast amount of knowledge) is fairly crucial for a modern human.

So, what do you think will be a future of a "long-delay" communications? "Old-school" minimal bandwidth protocols? Using a pre-compiled local knowledge bases? Data compressing algorithms with huge dictionaries? Hope for entangled particles use for communication?

And how it can change our experience of communications as well?


  👤 _Microft Accepted Answer ✓
Bandwidth is something that could be improved but latency cannot. Therefore the communication would be limited to asynchronous ways for anything beyond Moon. That means writing (digital) letters again or sending video or voice recordings.