
Raising a Ladder to the Moon, Under the Sea - ____Sash---701_
https://blogs.microsoft.com/today-in-tech/raising-a-ladder-to-the-moon-under-the-sea/
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harry-wood
Am I the only one who was disappointed that this wasn't an article about a
plan to _actually_ raise a ladder to the moon?

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djsumdog
Yea I was hoping this was about some new developments on a space elevator
cable, but with the base being out in sea or something.

A space elevator would be amazing, but we don't have any materials strong
enough yet to withstand the atmospheric sheer ... or a way to grab and pilot
an asteroid anchor into orbit .. yet.

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module0000
Kim Stanley Robinson, is that you??? Reading your comment(whether you intended
it this way or not), made me want to read 'The Mars Trilogy' again. If I
remember, grabbing and piloting an asteroid above Mars was how they setup
their space elevator.

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djsumdog
This is my absolute favourite sci-fi trilogy of all time. The part of the
series where he describes the most complex navigation A.I. ever developed by
humanity, on a ship that clamped onto an asteroid, setup a factory that mined
it for fuel to redirect its course ... it was so incredibly well written,
researched and believable. I read it while drunk on a bus and the next morning
I just had to go back and read that entire chapter again.

For those who haven't read it, it's a really good series.

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cstuder
No thread on submarine cables is complete without a link to Neal Stephensons
classic "Mother Earth Mother Board" article:

[https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/](https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/)

~~~
chrisweekly
Hey @cstuder, THANK YOU for that link! I've been a Stephenson fan for decades,
and had a Wired subscription for several years, yet somehow never came across
this article till just now. Saved it to finish reading later, but had to come
back and thank you. So good! :)

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z3t4
160Tbps on 8 fiber pairs is impressive. I wonder when we will get residential
Tbit fiber, it should not be that far long into the future. Just think of the
applications. In comparison a display cable "only" carriage a few Gbit of data
per second.

~~~
tempguy9999
I honestly can't think of any applications.

In the same way people bought new computers regularly until they got Fast
Enough then sales really slowed, I think we've reached the same state for
home-use comms.

BTW Shakespeare's full works uncompressed are about 5.4MB

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noneeeed
I've often wondered about this. I get about 50mbps at home, and it's
essentially more than enough for everything I do. Sure, having a faster
connection speed would be great for big downloads, but I've never had any idea
what I might do differently if I had gigabit fibre. Even something like 4k
video streams fit in several tens of mbps, a family of 4 could all stream
different 4k programmes with less than 200mbps between them.

I'm not sure if I'm just suffering a lack of imagination, and don't realise
what I'm missing out on.

People who have really fast connections (gigabit): what do you do differently
online that those of use with just "quite quick" connection don't?

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whatshisface
If enough people had super-fast internet, downloads would get bigger. You
could stream a desktop from a remote server for example. On a scale less
threatening to software freedom, games could stream their art assets, allowing
you to explore petabyte-sized worlds on consumer hardware. You could easily
toss trained neural networks back and forth for whatever applications were
dreamed up for them.

However, you're not going to see this if 99% of people have 50mpbs. In that
world, you'll only see things that use 50mpbs.

~~~
ianai
Being able to subscribe to a high end gaming machine that always has the
latest hardware and streams local is one option. Imagine always being able to
play games in max resolution and settings with no hiccups?

Or maybe virtualizing presences more often. We could manufacture displays the
size of walls right now - and presumably someday OLED that size will be
affordable.

Who knows what sort of real time innovations could be made. Ie tracking
objects at a small scale for large patches of land. Weather, wild life, idk.
Remote controlled drone surveillance for wild fires.

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larkeith
(2017)

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rvwaveren
Here's an overview of all submarine cables:
[https://www.submarinecablemap.com/](https://www.submarinecablemap.com/)

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simonebrunozzi
> ... establishes a faster and stronger telecommunications link not only to
> Europe, but to the next billion internet users that will come from Asia,
> Africa, and the Middle East.

I hate corporate PR so much for things like this. What's the point of talking
about Asia? Data to/from Asia goes mostly trough the Pacific Ocean, not
through Spain.

~~~
jmknoll
India, Iran, and the Middle East are also parts of Asia, and it might feasibly
be faster to transmit data through the Atlantic than the pacific to get to
those places.

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clopez
Why it goes up to Bilbao instead of only to Galicia or Portugal? That will be
shorter.

~~~
gehsty
Landing cable in an area where the largest waves in the world are routinely
seen is very 'challenging'.

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gehsty
I think we'll some form of power link going from UK -> US during our lifetime,
maybe via Iceland/Greenland so we can utilise the excess geothermal energy
from Iceland.

~~~
3JPLW
What makes you think that's a possibility? Power transportation over long
distances is lossy and thus very expensive.

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jawns
It is lossy _now_ and very expensive _now_. I think what the poster was saying
was such barriers may be surmountable in time.

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gehsty
I work in subsea power cables, AC transmission is not efficient, HVDC
transmission is efficient for long distances. India has HVDC links 1500km
long. I don’t understand the ‘lossy’ description, any energy transfer loses
energy, when dealing with utilities it is either acceptable or not. HVDC is
proven long distance transmission technology.

There is a subsea hvdc link in the early planning stage between Iceland and
the U.K. I think it is more likely the financing of the project is not
arranged yet than the technology.

The cost of these links is generally cheaper than a new build power station of
a similar capacity, so when you can transfer excess generation it becomes cost
effective to build.

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ninju
Old article...please add (2017) to title

>Today, September 22, 2017, ...

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fgheorghe
Yet spain still lags behind most other countries in terms of internet
connection speeds.

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lalos
Why didn't they explain the need for peanut butter? Food supplies for the
crew?

~~~
theandrewbailey
They did:

> It’s therefore perhaps not a surprise that the laying of the Marea cable
> involved not only the latest in fiber optic cable and repeater stations, but
> also 11,000 meals.

> This too required a variety of supplies – including 632 jars of peanut
> butter.

