The Internet in outer space
In his keynote address to the Internet Summit 98 in Geneva this morning, Cerf revealed that the next planned Mars mission was likely to take the infrastructure into space.
It's an improbable use for the IP technology which Cerf helped to create, he readily admits.
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"When you're talking about Pluto, TCP doesn't look too attractive anymore," he said. "We'll need some relays which terminate the IP and send it by some other means: these transmissions will be kind of unique: very high in error rate, and very low in signal to noise ratio."
Cerf kicked off the initiative with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory last November, he revealed. With the next Mars mission being planned, he suggested that leaving behind a gateway in orbit around the planet for future use was a possibility.
Turning to Jon Postel, the man behind the domain name architecture, Cerf asked whimsically "Should we have a single address space for the whole solar system. And if we use domain names, should we register .earth and .mars?"
".universe," was Sopel's thought.
"The Internet is growing quickly, we still have a lot of work to do to cover the planet," Cerf told the first day of the annual conference of the Internet Society in Geneva, where more than 1,500 cyberspace fans have gathered to seek answers to questions about the tangled web of the Internet.
Father of packet-switching
Cerf is the geek world's chosen adopted father because he, together with Robert Kahn, created the packet-switching technology that made the Internet possible.
Cerf said it would be possible to send real-time science data on the Internet from a space mission orbiting another planet such as Mars.
"There is now an effort under way to design and build an interplanetary Internet. The space research community is coming closer and closer and merging," Cerf said.
"We think that we will see planetary Internet networks that look very much like the ones we use today. We will need interplanetary gateways and there will be protocols to transmit data between these gateways," Cerf added.
"The idea is to take the interplanetary Internet design and make it a part of the infrastructure of the Mars mission," Cerf said.
Reuters contributed to this story.