When Trump ejects hims as he does all of the “bigly best experts” does he f**k right off to Mars then?

I just looked up the actual tweet and it’s even less than that. SpaceX is just responding to an RFP (that Blue Origin and Lockheed are also responding to) for the latest iteration of the existing network at Mars. The current system just takes advantage of Mars orbiters that already there. NASA would like to send…

Do you think you could transmit the entirety of all new internet information created on earth at every moment to Mars in real time? The backlog would be instantaneous, massive, and double every second. 

Can anyone explain why Musk is so bent on getting to Mars, and why he thinks it’s crucial to human survival? Is this just his back door way to admitting climate change is real and he would rather try to inhabit an inhabitable planet than keep our own habitable? Does he know that eventually the populous will turn on the…

“SpaceX is scheduled to deploy five unmanned rockets to Mars in 2026, and Elon says people will be going to Mars by 2028. Again, I have my doubts.”

IIRC the slowest achieved was through a strontium Bose-Einstein Condensate (an ultracold cloud of atoms that behaves very strangely to our macroscopic sensibilities) and was, like, 20 metres per second? (~40 Freedoms/Eagle)

That would be typical Musk exaggeration and bullshit. You know, like “full self driving” or “I can cut $2T from the government without sinking the country” or “how could I be a racist piece of shit? I’m from South Africa.”

Musk didn’t explain in enough detail to know if that’s what he’s getting at, but there’s no way that’s going to get petabyte bandwidth. Mars is still a really really really really long ways away, and the inverse square law kills — most of the signal will be lost traveling from Mars whether it comes from the surface or…

Lasers communicate slower than the speed of light (in a vacuum) when passing through air. The speed of light, whilst a constant, changes drastically depending on the refractive index of the medium through which it is passing.

“On Average” 

Let me help you. "Elmo doesn't understand anything" 

The tweet that Elon replied to specifically says “This network could serve Mars missions, allowing real-time images and data streams from Mars to Earth”

Real-time is clearly not possible and maybe Elon just missed that (or maybe he’s fine with people thinking it’s true).

This is the most thought provoking comment (to me anyways), on Jalopnik, in years.

Mars does not move in the same orbit around the sun, or at the same speed as Earth.

“Never underestimate the transmission bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the freeway.”

Might as well just use the Moon as a storage/web proxy between Earth and Mars! Store exabytes of static content up there so data doesn’t have to go between Earth and Mars directly! Brilliant!

Elon is reminding me of Henry Ford. When I first learned about Henry, he was an amazing innovator who created the assembly line and paid his working a high wage. Way to go Henry! Then I found out he thought the Nazis were on the right track with fascism. And that he published and distributed worldwide an astonishingly…

the speed at which you can load anything is still dependent on the speed of light

That seems to be part of the idea. The other part amounts to basically “throw a few signal boosters between here and there”, or, you know.. bullshit.

petabyte(bit)/second hasn’t anything to do with the transmission propagation rate, it has to do with the transmission bandwidth. Transmission delay has to do with the transmission propagation rate; as you noted, latency.