I've always wondered about the feasibility of using space for temporary/short-term storage needs.
I remember a time when, as a junior developer, I'd log into operations, and hand the operator my tape reel with my work for the day - and she'd go off, mount the spool, and start the streaming, until my files were available in local storage for a few hours, and then .. when logging out, I'd have the operator re-stream the files, and off we go ..
So, why not use space as a large tape buffer? Send the satellites off, 20 minutes of light-speed away, and use the big gap as a cache.
Seems sorta feasible to me, but I guess I'm overlooking some ridiculously obvious factor, such as launch costs, viability, etc. But really, seems like a fleet of satellites spread out around the solar system could function as quite a nice medium ..
The protocols are interesting, but it seems to me that point-to-point is more applicable in the vast emptiness that is outer space. Why send a packet to Mars when Jupiter is 5° to the left and I have a clear line of sight to both?
We have been experimenting with DTN network since 1996 with different types of delay mechanism based on different environment settings. It’s nice to see them in action now.
I remember talking to him about this in the late 1990s. He might have been talking at Comdex or somewhere.
DTN once was a fashionable research topic in before 2012, never thought it could actually been implemented.
Vint Cerf and RMS ... what a pair.
Vint helped spread the Internet beyond borders and to every Windows computer on the planet via async (aka PPP aka RAS). Sounds so awesome, doesn't it?
Meanwhile old RMS, an academic with tenure/nearly guaranteed income for life, finished us all off by establishing a political system that attracted all of the young minds to give away their software in such a way as to allow adversarial countries to obtain a 30 YEAR technological jumps without spending a friggin' dime.
(If you had any doubt that was his plan, you need only read https://news.slashdot.org/story/07/04/21/2025226/rms-protest...)
Combined, they created a platform for extremely ignorant and naive people to sip cups of coffee while uploading our national infrastructure and data to run on all that free software all over the planet. Yeah, they got theirs --now hackers are pouring through their websites and databases, Russia has ultrasonic weapons (who needs "StarTrek transporters" to deliver surprises) and China's Navy is the largest (sorry Taiwan!)
Don't even get me started about China's Space deployments --to orbit, the dark side of the moon and beyond. Maybe they can increase their efficiency using Vint Cerf's new suite of protocols.
Next they'll be saying, Bitcoin will be the interplanetary reserve asset. Then the interstellar. Intergalactic. Universal. Not in our lifetimes, is course. But it's coming.
What about neutrino communication? It's the biggest spectrum we haven't analyzed yet and it would perfectly make sense for an advanced civilization because it pass through matter much better than any other alternative.