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by DylanBohlender 1979 days ago
Assuming we establish communication relays between the Earth and Moon, Moon dwellers would probably be able to use the internet (albeit probably with a laggy connection by Earth standards). While remote socialization during the pandemic has been far from ideal, I think our last year's experience collectively has proven that socializing digitally is somewhat possible and might prevent (or at least mitigate) the worst effects of isolation.

If there are any physicists/engineers reading this that have the appropriate expertise to potentially work on something like it, I'd be super curious to hear your thoughts about how it could work.

Assuming we're supporting a Moon colony of nontrivial scale (~100 people maybe?), what would the experience of connecting to Earth's internet be like for the colonists? What infrastructure would we need to create to make it possible and/or improve it?
2 comments
lsllc 1978 days ago
Moon-Earth ping time would something like 2580ms [0]. If anyone remembers the days when phone calls to Australia were via geosynchronous satellite (vs undersea cables), there was maybe ~500ms delay and that was annoying enough, although you got used to it. TBH 2580ms for many applications would be fine (e.g. youtube, netflix, social media, github, chat/slack/teams etc).

If you take sci-fi as inspiration (e.g. The Expanse!), we might see less "realtime/two-way" voice/video chat and more one way "vmail" type messaging when RTT is too great for realtime.

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ping-between-earth-and-the...

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avmich 1979 days ago
I guess moon dwellers would be careful not to overload the space around them with radio waves, so the bulk of communications with Earth will be in focused optical beams. NASA had good results testing that with small optical trancivers.

Major cloud providers would perhaps have some presence on the Moon, so anybody could watch videos available over the Internet from local access points, no delays. Most communications at some point would also be local; talking with Earth will incur that unavoidable delay.

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