Yeah, but having that ping time of 36,000,000ms really kind of sucks.
Error-correction for dropped packets is also pretty shit.
oh, that's what's on my car.
Also having to manually bring the pigeon back to the launching site, because pigeons only work one way.
What if you attached two one-way pigeons together to make a two-way pidgeon? It would probably take a piece of string, and a coconut...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway"
Interestingly enough NASA still sends data this way. Huge HDD delivered by hand. Not all data, but I remember reading about some satellite images and similar data where latency doesn't matter. Can't beat good old box full of HDD.
I wondered why NASA was using pigeons till I read the rest of your comment.
yep, radio telescopes send data this way, thats how SETI@home got the Arecibo data
I'm not the original author:
Trebuchets are the most technologically advanced siege engines of all time, and are capable of hurling a 90kg stone over 300m using a counterweight.
With this in mind, we can perform the following calculations:
A 22TB WD Red Pro drive weighs 670g, with a maximum hurl weight of 90kg, trebuchet can hurl 134 drives at once, totalling 2,948 TB of data.
The average speed of a trebuchet projectile is 54m/s and the average size of an American 'block' is 100m. Lets presume 3 blocks to get our full trebuchets use (fuck you catapults).
It'll take 5.5 seconds for the projectile to go from launch to dramatic landing, meaning a throughput of 536TB a second.
Therefore, trebuchets are the best transfer method.
All of these methods have extreme bandwidth but terrible latency and packet loss.
Just use half the bandwidth for redundancy.
Poor HDDs
If you use Western Digital, the HDDs won't notice the extreme transfer method. They'll be unreadable either way
Haha, in some parts of germany you can do that yourself. on foot. with a zipdisk.
Good ole sneakernet. It's hard to have dropped packets when they're delivered by hand
It’s not. Just drop the storage device in a manhole, or get mugged, or break it in some way. Also when you do so, pretty much all packets are lost and to retransmit you need to go back to the point of origin and make a new copy, assuming you still have the original.
Can't help but think that they are rigging this for the bird. Just calculate how long it takes the bird to get from here to there and then pick a capacity that takes longer to download.
That's kind of the point though. It's not about practicalities.
There is an ancient proverb.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes."
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
There are no winners or losers here and they are not suggesting you start uploading things via pigeons, just gives a more interesting way to talk about and get people to think about how large volumes of data can and are still moved around via trucks and ships.
Yes and no.
If you could put a 1 petabyte flash drive on a pigeon, it would easily crush the gigabit internet
Does a 1 petabyte flash drive exist? Could it exist?
They put 3 stripped-down terabyte flash drives on the pigeon. Could it carry more weight?
You get to the point where the pigeon can't carry the weight.
All this is saying that sending data by pigeon can be faster and using 3 tb sticks proves it.
If it needed to be 4 tb, then they would have had to use 4 sticks. If it couldn't carry 4 sticks, then you have your answer that the pigeon can't do it with current technology.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of flash drives. The latency's most annoying though.
its like they choose 3 TB because they knew it was the smallest amount that would lose. lets make it a real re-match and go back to transfering 4 GB.
Lag is a real bitch though...
Yea, and packet size is enormous, so one lost packet is catastrophic...
This is why you use TCP: Trusted Concurrent Pigeons.
Trusted Pigeons so that a simple hash check can prove the veracity of your data AND provide a free dedupe / data integrity check for when multiple/single packets arrive.
Concurrent Pigeons so that transmission issues don't impact latency (throughput is essentially unlimited here, assuming sufficient pigeons)
Downsides include needing to implement a pigeon cache and power (birdfood) requirement increases.
When can I start using a pigeon to preload games like Starfield?
Used to be called "install disks" that you would have to preorder for the convenience of having it available at your local game store
This reminds me of the age when the egregiousness of home Internet data overage charges in Canada reached their zenith, with some back of the napkin math, I realized it would be more cost effectuvd to buy and fill a solid state drive (which had only begun to come down in price) with stuff, ship it overnight international, and then destroy it after downloading its contents, than to hit the overage charge limit with my provider.
I'd like to see that pigeon fly from Sydney to New York.
I wouldn't. Sounds boring.
Get back to me when a pigeon can deliver high-speed porn.
I wrote a similar blog post recently, about magnetic tapes in minivans. https://www.humancode.us/2023/02/03/a-minivan-full-of-magnetic-tape.html
Is the time of loading and downloading the files from the flash drives of the pigeon included?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
