There will be Netflix on Mars

March 6, 2016 7:43 PM

The future of space travel demands better communication. The pokey pace at which our current Martian spacecraft exchange data with Earth just isn't enough for future inhabitants who want to talk to their loved ones back home or spend a Saturday binge-watching Netflix. So NASA engineers have begun planning ways to build a better network. The idea is an interplanetary internet in which orbiters and satellites can talk to one another rather than solely relying on a direct link with the Deep Space Network, and scientific data can be transferred back to Earth with vastly improved efficiency and accuracy.
posted by Chrysostom (41 comments total)

The speed of light was too slow, and we didn't know how to fix that.

Raise the speed of light. Duh.
posted by Talez at 7:51 PM on March 6, 2016 [8 favorites]

There won't be netflix on Mars. None of the content is licensed for transmission off the planet, and their new vpn/proxy tracking will root out Martian visitors who are trying to watch American netflix.

But this technology being discussed is cool anyway.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:53 PM on March 6, 2016 [21 favorites]

I am so happy that I am not going to be the guy who has to write the date/time libraries for extraterrestrial servers.
posted by A dead Quaker at 7:56 PM on March 6, 2016 [51 favorites]

One of my favourite background, corner of the eye activities is to watch Deep Space Network Now ticking away, quietly announcing which dish is blasting bits at Voyager 1, Hayabusa 2 or who knows where else.
posted by zamboni at 7:59 PM on March 6, 2016 [17 favorites]

Just cache your friends' personality for pseudo-realtime chats! Your chatbot will update your friends' chatbot, so you both are on the same page about your recent conversations. In the event there's a netsplit between your virtual personality and your physical personality, one presumes the chatbot then gets a social security number and is a free agent, and you upload a new brainscan.
posted by mccarty.tim at 8:18 PM on March 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

I hope there will be Netflix on Mars, because it's going to be an extremely boring place to live for a very long time
posted by clockzero at 8:28 PM on March 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's a 1 year "life on mars" simulation going on, where they're living in a dome, only going outside into desert in mars suits,, and have simulated speed of light comm delays that prevent streaming etc. When I read through back posts on their blog http://livefrommars.life/ recently, there were a few amusing mentions of media that let's just say, probably shouldn't be available in that situation unless mission control has a torrent client handy.

A rational response to future needs for off-planet buffering of netflix shows, earthling access to MarsTube, etc would be to not have copyright limitations extend outside the atmosphere. But, I'm confident that, if this comes to be a problem, the rational solution to it won't prevail.
posted by joeyh at 8:38 PM on March 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

I am so happy that I am not going to be the guy who has to write the date/time libraries for extraterrestrial servers.

Which reminds me of an unfunny story: as the story mentions, JPL tested DTN with Deep Impact. Deep Impact continued on a long 8+ year extended mission, and was on the way to another asteroid in 2013 when it quit talking to us. What probably killed it was the 32 bit system time. 2³² deciseconds after Jan 1, 2000 works out to August 11, 2013, 00:38:49, right about when DI stopped phoning home. If you don't know the time, you don't know where home is.

On the topic of the article, you'll probably get a better handle on the subject by reading the Interplanetary Internet Wikipedia page.
posted by zamboni at 8:40 PM on March 6, 2016 [9 favorites]

Raise the speed of light. Duh.

Welcome to the Beyond.
posted by scalefree at 8:40 PM on March 6, 2016

So, for instance, if I wanted to, I could watch a film about sailors fighting in the dance hall...
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:40 PM on March 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

(Has anyone written a SF story yet where the aliens come, beam I Love Lucy back at us, and get immediately sued for copyright infringement?)
posted by joeyh at 8:42 PM on March 6, 2016 [9 favorites]

Mons Olympus Ate My Balls
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:44 PM on March 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Has anyone written a SF story yet where the aliens come, beam I Love Lucy back at us, and get immediately sued for copyright infringement?

Sorta yes, Year Zero. I highly recommend the audiobook, read by John Hodgman.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:44 PM on March 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

We'll have Netflix on Mars, but you'll have to schedule your binge watching 6 to 44 minutes ahead of time.
posted by enjoymoreradio at 8:54 PM on March 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

But will there be porn? Potential future astronauts want to know.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:20 PM on March 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

well, better support TLS or the aliens are gonna see everything.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:24 PM on March 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Testing minute long latency is not as trivial as it seems at first, need a real life testbed, may I propose: Comcast.
posted by sammyo at 9:38 PM on March 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

My exceptional friend Vint Cerf, who among other things invented the internet, is one of the foremost (ie only) experts on interstellar internet.

So pfft yeah Netflix on Mars? Not impressed. Trying watching Interstellar in orbit around Alpha Centauri B. Then let's talk.
posted by Mike Mongo at 9:46 PM on March 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

Netflix? I'm gonna binge on old Doctor Who and Twilight zone episodes.
posted by Sphinx at 9:57 PM on March 6, 2016

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       .---.        | (*) |  \   ))
   ..."FIDO "...    |__U__| /  \//
  '..:.......:..'    _//|| _\   /
      '.....'       (_/(_|(____/

posted by benzenedream at 10:27 PM on March 6, 2016 [7 favorites]

I hope there will be Netflix on Mars, because it's going to be an extremely boring place to live for a very long time

not with Perky Pat
posted by philip-random at 11:04 PM on March 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Soyuz full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:07 PM on March 6, 2016 [14 favorites]

I went to a session on the Interplanetary Internet organized by Vint Cerf at a Worldcon around 1990, it was a lot of fun to spitball issues and possible solutions with him and the other smart people there. Also notable that he so easily acknowledged what a big goof he made with the limited namespace of IPv4.

Sounds like there's been quite a lot of progress. Which is great because the Internet here one Earth is not always reliable, and I'm hoping that ways of coping with spotty and high-latency connections for interplanetary use can be fed back usefully to improve our everyday use.
posted by johnabbe at 11:38 PM on March 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

As benzenedream suggests above, there are better ways to do this than streaming the whole thing from Earth every time. Store & forward has been sadly neglected since Teh Internetz brought us expectations of instant everywhere. Over 25 years ago, when megabytes still meant something, I had many hundreds of megabytes delivered to me over my landline via Fidonet and other networks, mostly at night while I was sleeping - all at 2400 (later 14400) bps. Big datasets that were updated frequently were kept up to date by using difference files. Security? PGP was good enough back then: probably still will be, with larger keys, except for the NSA's back doors.

A colonist on Mars (or even further out) will never connect directly to Earth. They'll connect to their local Netflix (or other provider) node, which will use its local cache to instantly provide anything that has ever been sent to Mars. New releases will be encrypted and streamed to Mars in advance of the release date, and the decryption key (a few megabytes at most) will follow on the release date. News will just stream 24/7 and be available when it arrives - 20 minutes, a couple of hours, at the speed of light it's hardly going to make a difference unless someone is playing MITM with the interplanetary stock markets a la Venus Equilateral.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 12:02 AM on March 7, 2016 [10 favorites]

(Just adding - because perhaps it's not clear - yes, I did read TFA and I do know that Cerf's new work basically amounts to making Store & forward work reliably over interplanetary distances. I'm just saying that the rest really is Solved Problem).
posted by Autumn Leaf at 12:13 AM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Whenever NASA gets described as risk-averse it makes me uncomfortable. They are risk-averse in all the most penny-wise-pound-foolish ways. They're going to send people to Mars on shitty falling apart space jalopies and creaking legacy bullshit and it will be a true miracle if it ever succeeds.
posted by bleep at 1:08 AM on March 7, 2016

i was going to add that space internet should be called SubSpace but well we can't have nice things, we can only continue to repurpose legacy garbage instead of ever building something new.
posted by bleep at 1:10 AM on March 7, 2016

What you describe sounds right, Autumn Leaf. I think the really interesting question at this point is one hinted at at the end of the article: what applications lend themselves well to these sorts of networks and what applications don't. Like you say, this is a case of the past becoming the future, but that doesn't mean that there won't be some surprises if we ever get to that point. We've become very used to the relatively flat internet available when you have only one planet and good transcontinental interconnects, and not everything we're doing now is something we were doing before that was available.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:17 AM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

joeyh - “Space Copyright Law: the New Dimension”. They're working on it.
posted by IncognitoErgoSum at 5:03 AM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

it's going to be an extremely boring place to live for a very long time

Depending on how things go, Mars may be an extremely exciting place to live for a very short time.
posted by Candleman at 5:12 AM on March 7, 2016 [9 favorites]

They're going to send people to Mars on shitty falling apart space jalopies and creaking legacy bullshit

Are they? Last I checked we were building a giant rocket without a mission plan. Certainly they are stymied by seeing whether the next Congress and President give zero or one-tenths of a shit about space exploration except as Twitter photo-ops (hear anything about space travel in the debates?)

My money is on Musk, unless China starts up the space race and we find ourselves suddenly flush with cash, or if Trump discovers he can build a statue of himself on Mars.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:40 AM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

NASA isn't risk averse.

Taxpayers are risk adverse. That's why government procurement is a nightmare and why NASA is so limited it what it can/cannot do. No bucks, no Buck Rogers. You want NASA to do great things? Stop electing congresspeople who are afraid of great things.

Pretty much every single problem NASA has right now can be directly traced to Congress, ths, to the American voter.
posted by eriko at 5:43 AM on March 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

I am so happy that I am not going to be the guy who has to write the date/time libraries for extraterrestrial servers.
posted by A dead Quaker at 10:56 PM on March 6

Your tears of joy are actually visible on the internet.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:44 AM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I can't wait to have my Baby on Mars!
posted by evilDoug at 6:25 AM on March 7, 2016

hope there will be Netflix on Mars, because it's going to be an extremely boring place to live for a very long time


I heard it ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.
posted by drezdn at 7:20 AM on March 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

I am so happy that I am not going to be the guy who has to write the date/time libraries for extraterrestrial servers.

I hear that the last guy who tried to write code to convert from Mountain Standard Time in a leap year to Olympus Mons Daylight Time wound up accidentally summoning S'Haarj the Undying.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 7:23 AM on March 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

I hear that the last guy who tried to write code to convert from Mountain Standard Time in a leap year to Olympus Mons Daylight Time wound up accidentally summoning S'Haarj the Undying.

There's a whole mess of stuff in Wikipedia's Timekeeping on Mars, but GISS's Mars24 help page is probably the best publicly available technical summary of what the different US Mars missions have used, time-wise. Allison's Telling Time On Mars has a less technical, but less detailed, overview. Basically, the Mars mission clocks are largely based on Local Mean or Local True Solar Time (LMST, LTST), or some variation thereof, of the original landing site. Data subsequently stored in the Planetary Data System is tagged as UTC so you can correlate it with data from other missions. (q.v. PDS Standards Reference, Chap. 7.)

Maybe we could use Airy Mean Time (AMT)/Coordinated Mars Time (MTC) some day, now that we actually know where the meridian is…

In 1830s Germany, Beer and Mädler, makers of the first Mars globe, were trying to figure out the rotation period of Mars. Even though they were working with a fancy new telescope made by Fraunhofer, all they (and anyone else) could really see on Mars were albedo features - changes in contrast on the surface.

Here's their map. See the round blob labelled a at 0° on the left hemisphere? That's what they used as the reference point to measure the rotation. While their initial measurement was off by a whole 13 seconds, by 1837 they had it within 1.1 seconds. Not too shabby.

Schiaparelli and other subsequent observers used the same feature as the prime meridian- technically, Mars had an accepted prime meridian before Earth did. When Flammarion started labelling things on Mars, it made sense to call that dark feature (which they thought was water) Baie du Méridien (Meridian Bay), which later got latinized to Sinus Meridiani.

We finally got a decent look at Mars and Sinus Meridiani in the 1960s and 1970s, during Mariner and Viking. Now that we can actually see things up close, most of the classical albedo feature names have become obsolete. Sinus Meridiani has a diameter of 1622 km, or ~7% of the circumference of Mars, so it's impossible to treat the whole thing as a fixed meridian point. We could now see detailed things like craters, so Merton Davies, pioneer of planetary geodesy, picked a small crater inside a larger one to serve as the reference point. The large crater was named Airy, after George Biddell Airy, the astronomer who established Greenwich as the Prime Meridian. The little crater is Airy-0.

The whole system was pretty much based on just two pictures- Mariner 9 B-frame 533B03 (1972), and Viking 1 746A46 (1978). Only with Mars Global Surveyor (2001) do things start to get really detailed, but for the system to work, we need to know exactly where Airy-0 is in relation to everything else on Mars. Even during Mars Exploration Rover planning, Airy-0's location was vague enough for there to be ~20 seconds of uncertainty in AMT. We now have things tied down enough to use AMT/MTC, but we'll see how that goes.
posted by zamboni at 9:54 AM on March 7, 2016 [9 favorites]

Please name this project: Kermit.
posted by CincyBlues at 12:45 PM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

You're not getting the bits from Netflix directly on Earth, either. Netflix distributes caching appliances to ISPs all over the place for this exact reason. Since they control the caching policy, they can even do some clever engineering like preloading content they know is going to be popular and only distributing formats that are likely to be consumed.

A random article says one of those suckers costs $20k and weighs let's say 200lbs. A Falcon Heavy can allegedly lift 12 tons to Mars for $90M. Assuming I have my units right, that's $450,000 to lift a copy of Netflix to Mars. Assuming a 5-year depreciation schedule, $9/Earth month subscription fees and no other costs (ha), our bootleg Netflix on Mars is break-even at about 833 paying customers. This is obviously optimistic as hell, in real life you're probably going to have to bring more than one box, some infrastructure to plug them into and some spare parts. And of course that's assuming you can find a Mars mission willing to let you have 200lbs of payload at cost.

On the other hand, if you were optimizing for weight you could probably make the box itself more dense, maybe not waste payload bringing it down from orbit (save ~$100k!), or the obvious choice of just charging the Martians more. At $90/month, this silly example breaks even at less than 100 Martians.
posted by Skorgu at 3:33 PM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I wonder if DTN protocols will have some applicability to delivering data over geographically dispersed mesh networks. If I'm trying to send something to someone on the other side of my city (about 45 miles in a straight line) over a mesh network, that's a lot of hops, a lot of latency, and a lot of room for errors and disruptions. Not interplanetary latency, but much more than a traditional hierarchical network.
posted by Tehhund at 4:56 PM on March 7, 2016

Has anyone studied the psychological effect of 4K video vs 720p on astronauts? Someone write up a grant proposal.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:22 PM on March 7, 2016