Submarine cable resilience

I recently learnt about Transatlantic telegraph cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

It was laid in 1858. During its brief three-week lifespan, only 732 messages (amounting to roughly 400 total telegrams) were successfully transmitted before the cable died.

I work on autonomous submarines that image the seafloor, and let me tell you it is very hard to engineer deep ocean systems. Just operationally, testing things in rolling waves is a brutal job. Arguably at parity with space as an engineering design environment.

I worked for an L1 blockchain for a couple years and while the term "decentralized" is bandied about a bit too much, reading articles like this does underscore how vulnerable global traffic is.

e.g. some EVM chains have a majority of "stake" in either one country or several adjacent countries (particularly in Asia). A cable cut there, which the article points out has happened, can lead to the blockchain getting cut off or even halting.

If you care at all about this, you'll love Neal Stephenson's long article Mother Earth, Motherboard: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Ah, the “unusually unlucky” cables serving Taiwan and in the Baltics.

Like statistically impossibly unlucky.

I found https://smc.peering.tw/ fascinating. It shows an up to date status of submarine links to Taiwan and you can see many of them are having outages. Even more interesting is the historical view showing that the system operates in an always partly degraded regime

I have been trying, and failing, to buy a cross section of a submarine cable. I'd love one as an art piece for my house.

My son's school computing teacher was convinced that these oceanic communication cables float on the surface - to the extent they had a bit argument about it in class. I'm not sure how the teacher thought ships navigated around them.

Underwater cables have been one of the more awe inspiring things for me. I know nothing about them but they seem SO crazy and yet we have them running all across the oceans. .·°՞( ̑ ᗜ ̑ )՞°·.

How practical would be a mesh of satellites shooting lasers at each other, compared to undersea fiber-optic cables?

Alternatively, is there a wavelength of light to which water is completely transparent? Can we shoot lasers of that frequency through open water instead of through cables?

Maybe something that could be mounted on blue whales?

Reminds me of the Tom Scott video on the cable singe that leverages the moiré effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99_h30swtM