I don't know why I find it interesting but Psyche asteroid is 31 minutes and 33 light seconds from Earth. Assuming my math is correct, at 400 Mbps, there would be roughly 94 GB of data "in flight" through space between the satellite and the Earth.
> I didn't detect it coming. I first noticed it on a webcam feed, of all places. It must have come out of an observational blind spot. Solar glare alone cuts out a quarter of the sky, to say nothing of our enormous coverage shortfalls, but now's not the time for retrospectives.
After reading the story it makes me think of a quote from a Bujold book, where one fantasy character talks about how it was a godly miracle that 300 heathen invaders were completely eradicated after their grave sin of murdering one local saint, and another character retorts.
Adjusting that response to fit:
"I would be considerably more impressed with your global nanotech overlord AI," said Ista through her teeth, "if He could have arranged a few satellites worth of simple detection in advance, rather than several billion lives' worth of gaudy evacuation afterward."
It's definitely an interesting way of thinking about it. It makes the "how much data is currently in the queue" question much more interesting.
However, most of that data will be redundant. "Hi! I'm still here! I'm currently at blahblahblah position, and my status is nominal" over and over and over
What do you consider "in flight"? There's an old joke from Tanenbaum: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
And while it was very much not a high-capacity technique, you might find the mercury delay-line memory used by early computers interesting if you haven't heard of it before.
I don't know why I find it interesting but Psyche asteroid is 31 minutes and 33 light seconds from Earth. Assuming my math is correct, at 400 Mbps, there would be roughly 94 GB of data "in flight" through space between the satellite and the Earth.