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by bruce511 524 days ago
Hah - all of those examples use a planet as comparison. The first 16 bits of the address should be reserved to be used by the Planetary Internet Addressing Council (PIAC)

Allocating all addresses to Earth seems very shortsighted.

(Some sarcasm should be assumed.)

It doesn't really matter how you explain large-number math to people who are bad at large-number math (aka all of us) - there's always some bright-spark who misses the point.

2 comments

Well we could argue that this support for trillions of IP addresses is nice, except that IPv6 does not technically work in interplanetary environments due to various hardcoded timeouts.

The first martians are likely to run their own local network and then use a VPN over DTN for their everyday communications by email (and appear coming from a single IPv6 address).

One good thing though: since most of the humanity’s knowledge is going to be packed in an LLM they won’t really actually need internet to learn about things. But lack of videos may be annoying.

I see only one IPv6 timeout, for fragmented packet reassembly, in other words between reception of fragments. So it's a bound on jitter not latency, and I see no reason it couldn't be increased for interplanetary links.
The moon can share with the earth, and anything further away needs special encapsulation to deal with hours or more of latency.
It's only minutes for the inner planets. But of course that's already enough to require special treatment.