editing asynchronous content into a seamless experience
I’m sure I’m not the first one to have this thought.
I was reading this paper and thought about future communication problems and solutions. As humans travel further from Earth, the constraints of time-space on communication will grow in significance. If someone 1,000 lightyears away from Earth wants to send a message then it will take at least 1,000 years for Earth to get that message (we might figure out how to skip all that waiting with quantum physics though—and if so the rest of this thought might be meaningless).
For reference, the milkyway galaxy is 100,000 light years across.
To you and me 1,000 years is an awful long period of time to wait for a message. But if a person can live forever then maybe that is not such a long time. If we eventually reach a point where humans live forever via machine then I would suggest that establishing a protocol for simultaneous interaction across vast distances might be possible. This will be similar to editing video.
I imagine communication systems across these vast distances would be high bandwidth but high latency. In order to have a realtime simultaneous interaction (like talking face to face) We would solve this issue of latency by sending all possible interactions from each person to each person (or sending a copy of ourselves to the other person). That way we don’t have to wait 2 * 1,000 years. We only need to send the information once and then wait 1,000 years to receive simultaneously on both ends. But we would need an already established protocol for offering this method of communication. Both sides send information at the same time and wait 1 * 1,000 years to receive the output of a conversation.