Endovior wrote:Not to mention that it's actually vastly cheaper to lay cable then to use rockets to put big hunks of metal in the air, especially when there's no longer any notable fossil fuels.
FTCFH has permanent, city-sized moonbases and marsbases. They aren't using rockets any more. End of story. The only reasonable way to get that much stuff to mars is with a mass driver or some other non-rocket launch tech. Some of those are estimated to bring cost-to-orbit down to ranges where satellite launch would be available to the population at large. There's also the possibility of a fundamental revolution taking place that gives satellites huge individual pipes, something like broadcast RF transmissions being replaced with massively multiplexed
lasers.
[edit for thought: giving every satellite and base station a giant laser would also explain why nobody is worried about nuclear strikes despite there being dozens of terrorist nations hanging around.]
[quote="Endovior]we'd still have a unified Internet, since there'd still physically be connections between all the relevant places, and the megacorps could get little bits of profit reselling the parts of their connections they're not using to the Internet cache people.[/quote]That's true. The entire thing would be a hierarchy of bandwidth being resold and resold, inflating the cost as things go down. So, yes, the internet cache people will eventually maintain the internet's consistency, but it'll be kind of patchy as individual cachers get unlucky at auction. As Frank explains originally, the network will be
mostly consistent, and surprisingly fast, but also vulnerable to spoofing.
Did we ever figure out what the energy situation was like? Availability, comparison to fundamental cost of living and to median annual income, availability for large-scale industrial processes, methods for generation and transmission?