We can’t even get back to the moon right now, so maybe I’m worrying about this prematurely, but how will the internet work on a Mars colony? Considering current place in orbits, Mars can be anywhere from four to twenty light minutes away from Earth. That means if you’re on Mars and sent a request to see the webpage IMAO, it would take that many minutes for the server it’s on to get the request and that many minutes again to send the data back to you. That means it would take from eight to forty minutes to pull up IMAO — three times slower than normal!
Now, things like twitter and e-mail will work fine — there will just be a big delay and we’ll probably want to mark things so you know if you’re communicating with Mars and can expect a delayed response. And obviously, things like Skype and playing Call of Duty between Mars and Earth just aren’t going to happen. But we’re going to need the web and some quick way around the back and forth communication to bring up a webpage. I guess we’ll need to keep a cache of the web locally on Mars that’s constantly being updated from what’s on Earth, and then people on Mars will make their requests to those servers. The problem will be when info gets altered about something on both Mars and Earth, so we’ll need some good automated merge algorithms.
So, I don’t know when we’re going to start living on Mars, but we really should try to hammer out a solution to the internet problem before we get there. Last thing we want is to all get on Mars and be like, “Wait a second… we don’t have internet!” I’m just sketching out a few ideas on the problems we’ll have, but I can work on the solutions more fully as soon as someone in the government sends me millions of dollars (and don’t act like you don’t have millions to throw around pointlessly).