The more transportation and communication technology advance, the more we conquer time and space, and the less they matter. However, they still matter a lot, and will for the foreseeable future. We would need something faster than supersonic airplanes, or some kind of very high-fidelity VR/telepresence, for the effect of distance to be negligible.
Emphasis on “foreseeable”—maybe something will happen that makes distance obsolete.
On the other hand, it can only do so as long as we stay on one planet. Once we go beyond Earth, the speed of light makes distances matter again. Even between here and the Moon, a ~2.5-second round trip delay makes real-time conversations awkward. Between here and Mars, the delay is measured in minutes, making even basic web browsing basically impossible. Once we become interstellar, we’re basically forking human civilization. So probably “place” will always matter.
I know this is a minor point of yours, but I think straightforward extensions of existing web technology could solve the problem of communication between Earth and Moon or Mars, at least when interactivity with another human on earth is not required. CDNs already cache a large % of media your browser downloads. The number of round-trips needed is an optimization target in modern web engineering, and e.g. HTTP/2 introduced many new improvements for that. Compute also can move closer to the user; one can imagine AWS opening a new region “mars-1” with most or all of the same services they offer on earth.
The challenge here may actually be achieving the bandwidth needed to proactively push most data on the internet to Mars. High bandwidth (like fiber between major data centers) helps achieve impressive latency on Earth; I have no idea how difficult or expensive it would be to achieve such bandwidth between Earth and Mars.
Live collaboration is of course harder and the solutions to those seem to be more on the product and process side. Long-form writing, Loom video/screen recordings, and general written-first culture is something remote-first companies rely on today.
I think the Earth–Mars communication problem is definitely solvable, and it makes sense that the solution would be built on top of existing web standards. But I think new solutions and new standards/protocols would need to be developed, and it would be less than straightforward—it will require real engineering. And no matter what the solution, the overall user experience will be different.
The more transportation and communication technology advance, the more we conquer time and space, and the less they matter. However, they still matter a lot, and will for the foreseeable future. We would need something faster than supersonic airplanes, or some kind of very high-fidelity VR/telepresence, for the effect of distance to be negligible.
Emphasis on “foreseeable”—maybe something will happen that makes distance obsolete.
On the other hand, it can only do so as long as we stay on one planet. Once we go beyond Earth, the speed of light makes distances matter again. Even between here and the Moon, a ~2.5-second round trip delay makes real-time conversations awkward. Between here and Mars, the delay is measured in minutes, making even basic web browsing basically impossible. Once we become interstellar, we’re basically forking human civilization. So probably “place” will always matter.
I know this is a minor point of yours, but I think straightforward extensions of existing web technology could solve the problem of communication between Earth and Moon or Mars, at least when interactivity with another human on earth is not required. CDNs already cache a large % of media your browser downloads. The number of round-trips needed is an optimization target in modern web engineering, and e.g. HTTP/2 introduced many new improvements for that. Compute also can move closer to the user; one can imagine AWS opening a new region “mars-1” with most or all of the same services they offer on earth.
The challenge here may actually be achieving the bandwidth needed to proactively push most data on the internet to Mars. High bandwidth (like fiber between major data centers) helps achieve impressive latency on Earth; I have no idea how difficult or expensive it would be to achieve such bandwidth between Earth and Mars.
Live collaboration is of course harder and the solutions to those seem to be more on the product and process side. Long-form writing, Loom video/screen recordings, and general written-first culture is something remote-first companies rely on today.
I think the Earth–Mars communication problem is definitely solvable, and it makes sense that the solution would be built on top of existing web standards. But I think new solutions and new standards/protocols would need to be developed, and it would be less than straightforward—it will require real engineering. And no matter what the solution, the overall user experience will be different.