alt Hacker NewsOK, so the "Storing data in the network ... " title made me remember something.
If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data.
So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.
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Definitely one of the harder drives feasible!
Tom 7 did something reminiscent of this if you hadn't seen already: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio.
You could totally do that with the mirror on the moon. (Retroreflector + optical data transmission).
The moon is approximately (it varies) 1.3 light seconds away, i.e. a 2.6 second round trip, and optical links can have very high data rates. You could fit quite a lot of data on there! (Edit: although maybe the data rate won't be so high at these distances)
There is an archive of a lot of television transmission in space.
archive.space
You just need to be traveling faster than the radio waves, catch up and enjoy :)
There's a short story by Qntm called "Valuable Humans in Transit" that I like quite a bit which hinges on this subject: https://qntm.org/transi
My friend Joe Allen did this with the air in a room!
You can use fiber optics as an optical delay line too! About 60KB/km at 100Gbps.
Indeed: https://qntm.org/transi
pingfs has similar inspiration, where storage capacity scales with latency.
Discussed in 2015:
allegedly, this was used long ago. a teacher told us similar stories from his early career in the 80s
made my mind tickle for quite a while
Lacks the capability of random access, which limits the practicality of it. Cool idea still
"a man is not dead while his name is still spoken"
GNU John Dearheart
So if we can somehow preserve the signal and make it go round and round, can we get long term storage out of nothing?
Before I consumed calories over days to figure out syntax. Now, a language model exhausts those calories away in seconds. Eventually we will advance too far into the future that the tail end of humanity will forget how to make pants.
> If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence
Don't you worry!
AI rover robots are soon going to dominate Mars.
"Commenter shows off how smart they are with cool fun fact"
During NASA's Deep Space Optical Comms demo (https://www.nasa.gov/mission/deep-space-optical-communicatio...), they transmitted video at 267 Mbps from 16 million kilometers away. That's 1.78 GiB stored in space while in transit (assuming 53.3 seconds light-speed delay).
The furthest they did was 8.3 Mbps at 400 million km which is around ~1.38 GiB in transit.