Following the last launch of Starlink satellites, I came again across the video of Elon Musk in which he shares his vision and plan to make humans an interplanetary species. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole about the feasibility or not of this surrealistic project…Let us assume here that this will happen in the near future. Close enough to be able to transpose the vision of our world as we know it today. Mars is at an average distance of 76,000,000km from Earth. And the light travels approximalty at a speed of 300,000 km/s. This means that an electromagnetic wave emitted from the Earth toward Mars will take about 4min23. A father who wants to wish his son a happy new year by phone will have to wait at least 10min before hoping to listen to the answer: by adding roughly 1min14 of digital processing (protocols stack, network load, routing, converters/amplifiers…) and human processing (understanding, thinking, answering)…the 56k modems are formula 1 cars in comparison…An interesting horror movie plot would be the father receives his son’s answer within…1min!
We can see here how very advanced communication technologies will actually bring us back, from a behavioural point of view, to the time of the messenger pigeon or almost! In the era of high frequency trading for example, I think traders will not count among the passengers on the StarShip. Unless they want to become potato farmers (I am not refering to the SciFi Mat Deamon’s film The Martian, but to the very serious Internationa Potato Center’s Mars project).
One thing is for sure, this newsletter is safe…Friends on Earth will receive it in just 4min23 late! I can go back to bed with peace now!
END OF TRANSMISSION.