Elon Musk is a man who is accustomed to getting what he wants, and right now, it seems that he wants to put people on Mars. He’s not alone, as there are a few other high-profile efforts to put humans on the red planet.
So let’s assume they succeed. Musk wants a million people in a colony as soon as 40 years from the time they start launching spaceships filled with people to Mars. A million people would be equivalent to the 11th largest city in the U.S., right between San Jose, CA and Austin, TX. A little more than three and a half times the population of my company's hometown of Newark, NJ. That’s a lot of people to put on point-to-point radios.
While I’m sure scientists are busy right now with experiments on terraforming (I recently read that certain types of lichen are being investigated for oxygen generation potential), we already have one solution ready for them – VoIP. No doubt every piece of equipment on Mars will be networked, and there’s no reason why the phones won’t be networked as well.
But beyond the network, there are literally dozens of reasons to choose VoIP: codecs. Codecs are combination coder/decoders that convert audio/video signals into a compressed digital format for transmission, then reverts it back to uncompressed audio when it reaches the receiver. Codecs are algorithms used to compress digital audio signals.
When you’re constantly battling a hostile environment, you don’t want your phone calls to sound like little green aliens talking. A VoIP call can “negotiate” the right codec designed for optimal sound quality. Codecs can be high definition, low power (for rovers or mobile when out on long patrols) and packet-loss resilient, and can conceal packet loss, be low bandwidth, compress video and much more.
While we all wait for quantum information and entangled photons to enable near instant communication over long distances, Martians will still want to share stories of their exploration with family and friends on Earth Until then, codecs will be needed to record messages for digital store and forward – sending messages back to earth.
Another relatively new technology one would expect a Mars mission to take advantage of is software defined networking (SDN). SDN adds benefits including better bandwidth management, improved quality of service for a higher user experience, high-quality video support, lower packet loss and latency for a higher quality voice experience, all at a lower cost with better security.
We expect the first Martians to take advantage of many of the latest technologies, from hyperconverged infrastructure to software defined everything. Many of these technologies, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality, will be vital to giving humans in Mars’ hostile environment a fighting chance, but VoIP can do one thing that none of the other technologies can; remind Martians of home.
Small comforts and reminders of home, like picking up the phone to send a text or make a quick call, will be helpful reminders of Earth for people otherwise living a sci-fi life.
