2y ago

NASA uses laser to send video of a cat named Taters over 19 million miles

www.cbsnews.com

44 comments

What’s Taters, precious?
- Spoil em, flash em, laser out a few.
- Damn, beat me to it
Using a laser they could just as well send the cat. He would follow the laser just as well.
- Guess what the cat is doing in the video
  
  Taxes?
Video beamed. Video intercepted by aliens. Think cats rule earth.
They're right.
- They'd have to be really close. This doesn't even get close to Mars or Venus.
  
  They are.
  whistles x-files theme
- So correct.
What strikes me is not the bandwidth achieved but the precision of the technology to aim the laser. 19 million miles is a great distance to successfully aim a beam of light. As this technology develops, real time communications with objects in orbit like around Mars will be possible.
- Well realtime is just not true. But cool technology nonetheless.
- I'm wondering if we will need to tweak our Internet protocols to include interplanetary time? I would imagine mirroring would be much more important. Because light can only go so fast.
  
  Yes, the high latency and intermittent connectivity is a big challenge. Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is one good way of solving this problem.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
  
  I'm sure several OSI layers have already been modified by NASA to suit their needs. But, the protocols will pretty much remain standard.
  
  I think the issue, again will be date and time.
  DDMMYYYY + Planet + Orbit?
- The beam is reeeealy wide by the time it gets there. Still a great achivement, though.
- I presume that we're not yet concerned with what the Ansible tech awoke in the vast emptiness between, hmm?
Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections
That guy must be a Spectrum subscriber
"We're receiving coherent signals from the edge of the Milky Way."
"Life can exist in such isolation? What are they saying, do they need rescue?"
"It's a video of a small fuzzy animal."
"What?"
"When we probed deeper to get more context, we found millions of such videos, supposedly they're cherished non-intelligient companions and the people there wished to express that."
"...
...
What?"
- This strikes me with a "They're made of meat?!" vibe.
The article isn't terribly long, but here is the direct link to Taters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvJtVOmFs5Q
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=GvJtVOmFs5Q
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Thank goodness for "this is a test". For a moment I was panicking about an invasion of space cats and their terrifying laser hunting capabilities.
The MCRN & UNN would be proud.
Somewhere on my work wiki is a picture of puppies that I sent over SWIFT to a bank to test that the relationship was setup properly.
Cats and dogs are always acceptable test messages
This tracks
This is the correct use of technology. (But later let's test the ping on Doom over laserlan)
Taters is very precious!!
"What's Taters?"
"Po-ta-toes... Boil um mash um stick um in a stew!"
Taters, star surfer
That is cute. But why a cat?
- Because cute
  
  Right. I guess I kinda agree.
- Joke answer: It's cute.
  Real answer: It's cute and because of that broad appeal it's easy good PR. NASA has to appeal to the populace to hope they demand their Representatives properly fund them.
Taters should have his own wikipedia page. First outer space cat video.
Everything's fun and games until the Kilrathi discover this and its point of origin.

44 comments