Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
Hypothetically, if Mars were colonized and the colony was thriving, how would the internet need to change to deal with the 8 to 40 minute delay for a signal to get from one planet to the other and back? and to deal with any outages that would be caused when the sun was juxtaposed between them?

Obviously it would be entirely impractical to try to mirror the entire internet on both planets [...]
While it may seem impractical at first, that's very likely how it would work. Why? Because that is already how it works right now (for the most part). While it is very obvious that people wouldn't want to wait for 8-40 minutes when they click a link, it turns out that they don't even want to wait for 2-3 seconds. They want it instantly. That's why the Internet is already extremely redundant and has a lot of caching functionality. Larger services like Google, Youtube, etc. will also have their own redundancies in place.

Even if the delays were acceptable, undersea cables cost a lot of money and have limited bandwidth. At some point it simply becomes cheaper to build another data center on another continent instead of laying more cable (of course, in reality both are necessary to scale quickly enough to meet current demand). Consider watching a Youtube video from a European youtuber in the US. If only one person watches it, it's simpler to transmit it once and be done. But as soon as multiple people are watching it, it becomes more cost efficient to synchronize once across all global servers and then answer requests from the nearest server to the user.

While the Internet might seem like "one thing" from the outside, it isn't. It contains plenty of caches, duplicated data, and works very much in an asynchronous fashion already. Having interplanetory internet would clearly add some challenges but the core techniques of asynchronous transfer and caching are already in use today.