Of Space Travel, New Protocols & Dr. Cerf

The love affair between IT and outer space is easy to grasp. Engineers love a technological challenge, and what could be more daunting than the prospect of exploring, communicating, and working in regions that push the limits of science?

So it's no surprise to see people with keen IT interests, such as Esther Dyson and Sergey Brin, signing up for repeated and costly bouts of weightlessness above the Earth's atmosphere. That's also why we're hosting Dr. Vinton G. Cerf in a live chat next Monday... but more about that in a minute.

These folk maintain there's an important future in extraterrestrial IT. When I asked Dyson last year if private space travel was just another rich person's sport, her answer was: "Yes, but it's not trivial."

Space junkets will boost the technology required for space mining, space tourism, and other potential opportunities in the great beyond, she maintained -- a position she also stressed during the live chat session following her recent appearance on IE Radio.

The requirements of outer space will also boost research into new Internet protocols that will shape a more reliable and scalable Web on Earth.

Given all this, it seems only natural that Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP, the fundamental building block of the Web, has made interplanetary IP a priority on his research schedule.

Cerf, who now works at Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), helped develop the protocol for NASA's Deep Space Network, which was successfully tested for the first time late last year.

Cerf's work isn't just about outer space: The requirements faced by orbital IT will require a focus on delay-tolerant networks, which in turn are being considered for a variety of Earthbound applications, and could one day replace TCP/IP entirely.

To dig into this more deeply, Vint Cerf himself will be joining us online for a special youChat session on the topic of Interplanetary Internet next Monday, September 28.

The world doesn't produce visionaries like Vint Cerf every day. We welcome you to join us in this onetime opportunity to ask him questions in the medium he helped to create.

Click here on Monday at 2 p.m. EST to join the chat. You'll need to be a registered user of Internet Evolution, which you can do quickly and painlessly here.

See you there!

— Mary Jander, ThinkerNet Editor, Internet Evolution

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