Finally, the singularity has happened.
They keep reiterating “faster, faster”. But the discussion is “laser” vs. “radio”.
Surprise: both travel at the speed of light. Both are the same speed.
Hmmm.
Are they afraid of having to explain “bandwidth”?
When talking communication, most people think of the speed with which a unit quantity of information is transmitted, not the latency of that transmission.
Referring to bandwidth as the speed of a communication system is pretty normal, even for people who know how to use the term bandwidth.people think of […] not the latency of that transmission.
And when that latency goes up from a few millis (from google to you) to, let’s say, 10 minutes (from mars to earth), then they would start to notice it :)
Oh, certainly. But common language has a term for high latency already, it’s just not speed related. Everyone knows about a laggy connection on a phone or video call.
Fun fact: TCP has some implicit design considerations around the maximum cost of packet retransmission on a viable link that only works on roughly local planetary scale.
When NASA started to get out to Mars with the space Internet, they needed to tweak tcp to fit retransmission being proportionally much more expensive and let connections live longer before being “broken”.
As is tradition. The first image transferred over the internet-precursor was also a cat picture.
Eventually we will attain our ultimate goal of transferring cats
Catapults already exist.
You have to keep the image intact though.
Work continues on the Trebuchat.
