Re: IPv6 Ignorance

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Sep 18, 2012, at 09:38 , Jason Baugher <jason () thebaughers com> wrote:

> On 9/18/2012 11:01 AM, Beeman, Davis wrote:
> > Orbits may not be important to this calculation, but just doing some quick head math, I believe large skyscrapers 
> > could already have close to this concentration of addresses, if you reduce them down to flat earth surface area.  
> > The point here is that breaking out the math based on the surface area of the earth is silly, as we do not utilize 
> > the surface of the earth in a flat manner...
> >
> > Davis Beeman
> >
> >
> > > On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 11:27:04AM -0700, Owen DeLong wrote:
> > >
> > > > What technology are you planning to deploy that will consume more than 2 addresses per square cm?
> > > Easy. Think volume (as in: orbit), and think um^3 for a functional
> > > computers ;)
> > I meant real-world application.
> >
> > Orbits are limited due to the required combination of speed and altitude. There are a limited number of achievable 
> > altitudes and collision avoidance also creates interesting problems in time-slotting for orbits which are not 
> > geostationary.
> >
> > Geostationary orbits are currently limited to one object per degree of earth surface, and even at 4x that, you could 
> > give every satellite a /48 and still not burn through a /32.
> >
> > Owen
> What about network-based objects outside of our orbit? If we're talking about IPv6 in the long-term, I think we have 
> to assume we'll have networked devices on the moon or at other locations in space.
>
> Jason

The IP protocol is not well suited to space travel. As such, I think there would be a non-address based scaling limit 
in IPv6 for that application and a new protocol would be needed.

Owen