Long Term Space Travelers Keeping In Contact With Humans Still On Earth

Obviously, it is going to be lonely in space, and humans need companionship and social interaction. If the crew is very small, it makes sense to have them stay in contact with people on Earth. Ah, but what about the time delays my acquaintance asks – long distance communication is going to be a challenge, and although we may someday be able to send communication correspondence faster than the speed of light, it’s still going to take time for those messages to arrive. Okay so, let’s talk.

You see, an acquaintance mentions that it will be difficult to make sure those messages arrive, and it might be necessary to put out relay stations to send the message, just as satellites around Earth can relay messages to someone on the opposite side of the planet. The relay stations, he suggests “space buoys” could also serve as navigational aids, similar to a GPS strategy.

Interesting isn’t it? Well, indeed it is, and yes, the time delay is a problem as the spaceships get further away. But even if it took months or a year between replies, the individual brain could be discussing things with tens of thousands of people, and if the people on earth coordinated the questions, they wouldn’t be duplicating them, therefore the individual answering the questions wouldn’t have to repeat the answers, therefore the brain would be constantly busy interacting with people on earth.

They might ask a question, and simply wait for a year for the answer, and then the follow-up. When it comes to humans communicating at the speed of light let’s say with perhaps another species on the other side of the galaxy, it might take hundreds of years to get a reply, and those humans that made the first communication would be dead by the time the other species that far away replied. Likewise, there would be new technologies by then. Perhaps the other species could answer very quickly, but the humans waited that long to reply, it wouldn’t make sense to continue the conversation.

Additionally, Earth’s Internet would really be an intranet system, with the Galactic Internet being the real Internet or overall encompassing communication system that point, it would be another layer above the Internet, just as Facebook is becoming its own system within the Internet even though something like Facebook would actually have the potential for becoming larger than the Internet someday, not likely in Facebook’s case but that could occur.

The Galactic Internet would be the biggie, the Earth’s Internet would become an intranet, just as a company’s IT system would be an intranet, even when coupled to the Internet. You see that point? As a franchisor, we had franchisees that could have become bigger than our company that happens too. Of course, a space colony on a very large planet with lots of resources could grow to more people than on Earth someday too. Interesting yes? Please think on this.