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I've had a couple of email discussions about my Aquarius post earlier today, and I'll clarify some points.
Aquarius was the name of the Lunar Module of Apollo 13 (in 1970).
"Emergency lifeboat" is a reference to how the Lunar Module was repurposed to serve as a minimal life support raft to conserve power. This is the most relevant instance of reducing power consumption in all of space travel to my knowledge.
I don't expect the collapse of society or any other real emergency, and I don't consider this protocol very useful for such a scenario. If there was an emergency, I expect to need very different things than network protocols. Theoretically the question of bootstrapping technology interests me, but I'm not interested in preparing for unusual circumstances.
Avian carriers is a reference to RFC 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service. It's an April fools' joke.
For distributing content without an always-on internet there are different good methods, sneakernet being a reference to them. There are protocols designed for this. I know of Scuttlebutt and IIRC there are plenty of ad hoc mesh network projects.
So plenty of the references are a bit tongue-in-the-cheek. But not everything.
It is possible to build computer hardware that runs for a decade on a single set of alkaline batteries, collecting data and sending it out over a radio connection many times a day.
The bottleneck for such use case is the use of radio bandwidth: the unnecessary round-trips that TCP introduces would significantly reduce battery life just because the radio needs to stay on much longer for every communication.
Finally, I don't consider Aquarius the hypothetical protocol useful for almost anything but I find some beauty in the idea. And I'm a geek who loves esoteric things so I might implement it just because.
I think TLS is a good match for Gemini: TLS and TCP go well together. I hope Aquarius could help people realize what giving up confidentiality and integrity means.
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