I just thought of a use of transferring that much data. Interplanetary backups. Imagine if we could backup all the data of Earth to Mars. Or, what if we find a new planet full of data, and we want to send it back to Earth?
Yeah, but what the fuck kind of application will ever need the transfer of a Yottabyte of data? Maybe if you're moving a strong AI or something, but the entirety of the internet circa 2009 was only 500 exabytes, and the grand total of all storage systems on earth doesn't even equal one zettabyte.
640K is enough RAM for anyone. Apparently Bill Gates didn't actually say that. Regardless, it is a stupid thing to say, and you are saying it now.
I knew I was saying it as I typed it. Oh well.
If I nuked a Cylon planet while a resurrection hub is in orbit, I bet there'd be some yottabytes of data being transferred.
Depends on the amount of Cylons being uploaded and downloaded. Upper estimated data capacity of the human brain for long-term memory is around 3 petabytes. Still an excellent example; I'm a huge proponent of consciousness uploading, and I didn't think about this one. Derp.
Also, Scott provides a good point, though at some point I can foresee the need to come up with some sort of interplanetary data relay that doesn't require physical storage. I wonder what the bandwidth of optical transmission over cosmic distances would be? Voices from a Distant Star makes the point that the latency would be astronomical (pun intended), but it'd be necessary and faster for smaller messages. That said, there's present speculation about "superluminal" (technically not, as causality wouldn't be violated) communication by opening microscopic wormholes and shooting lasers through to wherever they connect to. So there's that.
Every single communication device has a tiny wormhole generator on it. When it communicates it effectively reduces the distance between the two endpoints so that they are right next to each other and communication is effectively instantaneous.
For group communications/multicast you all wormhole to some predetermined point in space. For safety, maybe some predetermine point in another dimension or demiplane or something. Then make a phone call and some celestial horror comes out!
Every single communication device has a tiny wormhole generator on it. When it communicates it effectively reduces the distance between the two endpoints so that they are right next to each other and communication is effectively instantaneous.
For group communications/multicast you all wormhole to some predetermined point in space. For safety, maybe some predetermine point in another dimension or demiplane or something. Then make a phone call and some celestial horror comes out!
Is that wormhole communication device in your hand giving you SuperCancer? More on the Intergalactic News at 10.
Every single communication device has a tiny wormhole generator on it. When it communicates it effectively reduces the distance between the two endpoints so that they are right next to each other and communication is effectively instantaneous.
For group communications/multicast you all wormhole to some predetermined point in space. For safety, maybe some predetermine point in another dimension or demiplane or something. Then make a phone call and some celestial horror comes out!
Is that wormhole communication device in your hand giving you SuperCancer? More on the Intergalactic News at 10.
Since you need to store and manipulate exotic matter to sustain even the smallest wormhole, we'd probably have massive interstellar relay stations and patch through to them through devices not too far removed from cell phones nowadays. No supercancer for us!
Every single communication device has a tiny wormhole generator on it. When it communicates it effectively reduces the distance between the two endpoints so that they are right next to each other and communication is effectively instantaneous.
For group communications/multicast you all wormhole to some predetermined point in space. For safety, maybe some predetermine point in another dimension or demiplane or something. Then make a phone call and some celestial horror comes out!
Is that wormhole communication device in your hand giving you SuperCancer? More on the Intergalactic News at 10.
Since you need to store and manipulate exotic matter to sustain even the smallest wormhole, we'd probably have massive interstellar relay stations and patch through to them through devices not too far removed from cell phones nowadays. No supercancer for us!
That won't work because interstella SOPA will censor and spy on all the interstellar communications at the relay station. To make a distributed network we all need our own wormhole generators.
Well, it's pretty trivial to build your own fusor; if we can figure out how harness energy from a fusion reaction, we'd have the energy necessary to work on our own substations.
That depends on when we hit the cap of storage density.
That is a good point -- when he hit a storage density cap, the best we could do shipping data, assuming the current laws of physics hold up, is probably equal to what we can do transmitting data over (note: this is a quick guess, no guarantee I got it right here). About the only thing that could affect this is if we come up with a technology that allows physical entities to travel faster than the speed of light but communications are still capped at light speed (isn't this the plot from Voices from a Distant Star?). In that case, the irony will be that shipping physical media would actually have less latency than transmitting it.
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Also, Scott provides a good point, though at some point I can foresee the need to come up with some sort of interplanetary data relay that doesn't require physical storage. I wonder what the bandwidth of optical transmission over cosmic distances would be? Voices from a Distant Star makes the point that the latency would be astronomical (pun intended), but it'd be necessary and faster for smaller messages. That said, there's present speculation about "superluminal" (technically not, as causality wouldn't be violated) communication by opening microscopic wormholes and shooting lasers through to wherever they connect to. So there's that.
For group communications/multicast you all wormhole to some predetermined point in space. For safety, maybe some predetermine point in another dimension or demiplane or something. Then make a phone call and some celestial horror comes out!