The really cool thing about a one way to mars is that the one-way-naught would be far less isolated than the explorers of old. Today you could carry with you nearly all of the books of earth plus endless TV and movies.

Interplanetary radio would at least allow you to keep up with news on earth. With the tenacity of the amateur radio crowd, it probably wouldn't be long before the first dah's and dit's started showing up.

Back on earth, you'd be one of the most well known celebrities ever to exist.

Truman Show?

This is where tabbed browsing would shine. Open a page on wikipedia, open a bunch of links in other tabs, and by the time you're done reading the first page, all the others are loaded. Rinse & repeat.

I think TCP would probably time out on the receiving side before you even established the 3 way handshake. You'd have to set up some kind of store-and-forward proxy on Earth using UDP or something with a cache on the Mars side.

You could make this transparent to the browser. A forward web-proxy on the mars side that has a local 1TB cache that doesn't expire for months. If a request misses the cache, it is queued to be sent with the next upload transmission. An hour later, the requested URLs (and all related data that a simulated browser session required) appear in the cache.

You could auto-crawl sites via RSS feed, transmitting the contents many links deep. Each colonist could then subscribe to whatever sites interested them, including RSS feeds from sites such as HN. All the crawling would be done by a server on Earth which has a reliable (but delayed) channel to Mars.

The transmission between Earth and Mars would not be TCP/IP - it would be a protocol designed to maximise data recoverability without re-sending packets. It could use techniques such as 2d hamming codes for this (hashes within each packet and across many packets).

That is exactly what I was thinking, some kind of channel that just blasts content to the Mars cache using a list of specific requests as well as filling up the rest of the available bandwidth with a predictive algorithm and/or crawler. Unfortunately, I'm probably just gonna have to be happy if we even land someone on Mars in my lifetime.

This sounds too much like Stallman reading his email.

Some kind of delay tolerant protocol, perhaps? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet

Actually NASA has done some successful tests with Deep Space Internet:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/nov/HQ_08-298_Deep_spac...

Interplanetary Internet Project: http://www.ipnsig.org/home.htm

Ya, online recreation would quickly be hampered by "no Martian HPB" game servers

Use a proxy with a 10 terabytes cache, it should be enough :) You don't really need HN in real time anyway, do you?