[HN Gopher] Inter-Planetary Network Special Interest Group
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       Inter-Planetary Network Special Interest Group
        
       Author : OhMeadhbh
       Score  : 65 points
       Date   : 2025-07-24 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.ipnsig.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.ipnsig.org)
        
       | OhMeadhbh wrote:
       | With all the jibber-jabber about Starlink being down, I figured
       | it was an appropriate time to remind people this exists. Vint
       | Cerf, one of the founding wizzards of the internet, established
       | the IPN SIG in 1998 to cuss and discuss issues related to IP
       | protocols over high-latency, potentially high-loss links. Worth
       | poking around if you've not seen it before, though I sort of wish
       | there were more use cases regarding information security.
        
         | jvanderbot wrote:
         | I used to work with some of those board members at JPL!
         | 
         | DTN is cool stuff. We had a few applications built up for
         | distributed "delay aware" computing so that you could, at the
         | network/application boundary, farm out jobs for e.g., an
         | orbiting compute cluster coming over the horizon.
         | 
         | Really fun times.
        
         | dcminter wrote:
         | Off topic, but...
         | 
         | > to cuss and discuss
         | 
         | ...is a turn of phrase that's new to me and I love it. Totally
         | stealing that.
        
       | LorenDB wrote:
       | IMO the most likely solution to interplanetary networking is to
       | throw tons of datacenter and compute that's anywhere more than a
       | few light-seconds from the nearest existing datacenter, then use
       | something along the lines of IPFS to perform data synchronization
       | between planets.
        
         | macintux wrote:
         | How would that work to, say, Mars? Have satellites filling
         | many, _many_ orbits between the two planets?
        
           | cjtrowbridge wrote:
           | We already have an interplanetary internet called the NASA
           | Deep Space Network. Understanding it's limitations and
           | challenges is a good way to start thinking about this.
        
           | BizarroLand wrote:
           | Nah, nothing that extreme. The broadcast range and bandwidth
           | of even current technology in space could handle a huge
           | amount of fairly rapid data transfer between the two planets.
           | 
           | It would be more like a handful of satellites, some orbiting
           | earth, some orbiting mars, and then a handful of relay
           | satellites serving as intermediaries.
           | 
           | Don't count on playing e-sports competitively, though.
           | 
           | The lag under ideal conditions would be insane, about 2.5
           | minutes each way (when the planets are "only" 40 million
           | kilometers apart), but with repeaters and overhead probably
           | closer to twice that.
        
         | knome wrote:
         | there's a lot of interesting problems just in the networking.
         | 
         | if it took four years for a message to cross the void from
         | where you are to the recipient, you certainly wouldn't want to
         | wait a full eight years to see they didn't send a receipt
         | message and only then retransmit.
         | 
         | eight years is some awful latency.
         | 
         | you'd probably want to send each message at something like a
         | fibonacci over the months. so, gaps of (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc)
         | would mean sending the message on months (1, 2, 4, 7, 12, 20,
         | 33, etc) until you got a confirmation message that they had
         | received it. they would similarly want to send confirmations in
         | the same sort of pattern until they stopped receiving copies of
         | that message.
         | 
         | spreading the resends out over time would ensure not all of
         | your bandwidth was going to retransmissions. you'd want that
         | higher number of initial transmissions in hopes that enough of
         | the message makes it across the void that they would have
         | started sending receipts reasonably close to the four years the
         | initial message would take to get there.
         | 
         | if you had the equivalent of a galactic fido-net system, it
         | could be decades and lifetimes between messages sent to distant
         | stars and messages sent back.
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-24 23:00 UTC)