There's an ongoing/recurring experiment that NASA runs where a group of pretend-astronauts spends several months in a pretend Mars habitat with limited internet connection to Earth [1]. A podcast [2] was recently released where they go in-depth and interview the participants, and they touch on the whole "what am I supposed to do without the internet for 6 months?" issue a lot, but it never really seems to be that big of an issue. They do get bored, but most of the participants do stuff like learn a new language, study a textbook, or read a lot of novels. They also have a lot of "work" (like experiments etc) to keep them busy every day.
1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mars-research-crew-emerges...
Yes, but they weren't trapped in a metal box for years.
Surely being on a craft in deep space is not that much different to being on a nuclear sub for months and months on end, smaller I guess.
If not for the criminal record being a huge factor in job applications later, I'd consider low-security prison to be a pretty good way of getting a sabbatical. It's almost like basic income.
Reminds me of that time I remember from my childhood, when my dad had a friend in a hospital, and would go on ranting about how that friend has much worse food and entertainment than a typical prisoner...
Obviously relationships will develop regardless, you put people together they are going to do stuff. It's just a another challenge, in my mind, rather than an advantage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...
Actully, now that I think better of it I wouldn't need a batteries included language; having so much time I could implement the "batteries" myself!
This isn't as silly as it sounds.
Netflix already offers boxes ISPs can put in their datacenter. They store the entire library locally. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
Plop Wikipedia, Netflix, a daily snapshot of news, social media, Reddit, etc. on one and you've probably got enough for most folks.
More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship.
https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592...
> According to Netflix's own documentation, "An individual appliance can offload approximately 60%-80% of content requests depending on country catalog size," but when units start working in pairs, the storage size can exceed the size of Netflix's library for a region. And when this happens, the pair will use their excess storage to double up on stuff to help deal with high demand, or to make sure that if one fails, the other still has as much content as possible.
> More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship.
No need to have the entire internet, just the most popular tenth of a percent, and just daily updates of what's new. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html is currently downloading from Mars at 3 megabit. I'd expect Earth-to-Mars can be much faster than Mars-to-Earth from a car-sized orbiter with a small dish and limited power.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19950183 indicates optical Mars-to-Earth links of 1 Gbps soon, as well.
For Netflix, just send a new box every 3-6 months on the next rocket. The ISS already gets in-theater movies well before they're released on DVD, so you could even have release dates synchronized for no delay whatsoever!
- a typical flash drive would be 256GiB = 262144MiB = 268435456 kiB
- a week contains 7243600 = 604800s
=> A sustained connection of 450 kiB/s would be able to provide for the same kind of update as what people in Cuba do.
Plus they probably won't get scurvy, so there is that.
Speak for yourself! :D
The description says "three-dimensional" but I would argue that it's two-dimensional and regular Monopoly is one-dimensional (linear). I think with a lot of time on your hands, you could make Monopoly truely three-dimensional with layers, and then even four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time.
Reminds me of Continuum series. Is getting a seat in the Corporate Congress a victory or defeat condition?
Or use a fourth spatial dimension, like a 4D Rubik's Cube or Miegakure.
But yeah, I think a sample of the internet stored offline could work. Maybe mix that with a P2P system that lets people post pages, social media posts, etc with other people on the ship, like you can with IPFS/Freenet/ZeroNet/whatever.
It's not perfect but assuming you can make a static version of these I'm sure you can fit it under a few terabytes.
i think your description is correct, but still. there's a lot to be said for the virtues of being eminently stable.
besides, the creative people can do the thinking for them from earth.
It's fairly disturbing that some people can't even imagine surviving without modern conveniences.
Seriously though, they'll need to have some sort of non-work, non-research activities to last the months it will take to get anywhere. You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times.