Transcriber: Pei Fang Ng Reviewer: Sam HK
We live in a physical world.
We also live in a physical world
that's in a process of merging with the digital world.
As a consequence,
increasingly, aspect of the physical world
such as, say,
the fact that it's geographically distributed,
are starting to impact our digital experiences.
This is a worldwide property,
and it's due to the fact
that we live all across the surface of a planet
that has a finite diameter.
So, for example, in virtual worlds,
if you have one party on one side of the planet,
and one party on another side of the planet,
that are interacting via a virtual world,
such as Second Life,
the experience delays due to the fact
that light takes a finite amount of time
to travel around the Earth's surface
in order to connect them.
And this problem isn't in any way
specific to virtual worlds or entertainment.
It's a problem that's keenly felt in industrial sectors,
in financial sectors.
Financial sector in particular,
is very well incentified to make sure
that the time delays for transmitting information
between financial exchanges is minimised.
One more example,
telerobotics and telesurgery.
As we move towards an era,
where a physician in one location on Earth
can perform surgery on a patient
on the opposite end of the Earth,
the delays involved in manipulating remote machines
become increasingly essential to performance.
And so how if we try to combat this thus far?
This is a map of submarine cables
strewn all around the Earth's oceans and on land.
We are literally wiring up our planet surface
in order to efficiently allow information to flow
from any point on the Earth's surface
to any other point on the Earth's surface.
You might imagine
we are relatively close to
solving this problem of information delays.
But of course,
as with all physical properties,
there are limits.
Here's one very important one.
What you're seeing here are 2 maps
of some of the state-of-the-art
Internet connections connecting locations.
On the left,
a New York to Chicago connection.
On the right,
New York to London.
Interestingly,
if you look at the amount of time it takes
to send information back and forth,
through these pipes,
and you compare it
with the theoretical physical limit
to how fast you could send information round trip
using light through optical fiber,
you'll notice
that we're literally approaching
the physical limits allowed to us
for sending information around the Earth
between these important cities.
This is the problem for the reasons I've mentioned
that's only going to become more exacerbated with time.
Why is this a problem?
Well, the way we've architected
many of our global transactions right now on the Internet,
and our networks in general,
requires round trip transactions.
So, you have location A,
and location B,
and you want to coordinate processes
between these two locations,
they have to send information to each other
about their current state,
and wait for the other party
to react to that new information,
and send back an execution signal.
In other words,
for most transactions today,
you're stuck with round trip delays
on the Internet.
Now, biology,
as has historically been the case,
has come up with a solution to this problem.
So, if you as a human,
touch a hot surface,
you'll note, that your hand pulls itself back
before you feel the pain in your mind.
And the reason is that the pain signal
isn't travelling the entire distance
from your finger up to your brain,
and then back to your motor neurons,
to pull your hand back.
Instead, it's just travelling to an intermediate location,
your spinal column,
where it's immediately recognized
as actionable information,
and signals are immediately turned around
for a more rapid response.
It's called a reflex arc.
So, biology is handing us the solution.
We can do reflex arcs for global networking.
So rather than doing
round trip transmission of information,
let's instead position server infrastructure
at well selected intermediate locations
between two different geographic locations
that need to be coordinated.
So, this is a problem
that I've been thinking about
for a number of years:
how best to position these intermediate locations
in order to literally get around the speed of light
by not being forced to wait for this round trip transmission?
And recently,
I identified and published the optimal solution.
So, what you're seeing here is an equation
that describes the theoretical optimal solution
for where to place yourself
in between two different locations
in order to optimally coordinate processes
happening at either end.
And so, just for fun,
I've taken this equation,
and applied it to a financial task.
So, what you're looking at here,
is literally a treasure map.
The large red dots represent
the world's largest stock exchanges,
and the small blue dots here
represent the calculated optimal intermediate locations
for coordinating, trading,
on pairs of these exchanges.
And you'll note,
that many of these optimal intermediate locations
are in network sparse areas,
and on oceans.
And so, this presents us with what may perhaps be
the first excuse to literally boil the oceans
using computation.
Now, how do we go about to deploying this new infrastructure?
So, I've shown here 3 different modalities
for deploying these new servers
that would be responsible for creating global reflex arcs,
in order to help us get around speed of light limitations.
So, on the left,
you see microwave towers,
we see balloons in the middle,
and we see microwave buoys,
microwave relay buoys, to the right.
These are just 3 modalities by which one can envisage,
getting around the speed of light
due to the Earth's finite size.
And so, I think, stepping back,
we're faced with an opportunity at this point in time,
to not just bump up against
the finite speed of light,
as a pretence to telecommunications on Earth,
but to use this as an opportunity
to create lots of new infrastructure in locations
that previously had none, and in particular,
I'm especially fond of this analogy,
the Silk Road, or the Silk Route,
the trade of silk was responsible,
in the first few centuries CE,
for creating economic growth
at intermediate locations
between opposite ends of a trade route.
And I think the opportunity here
is to leverage the finite speed of light
to deploy infrastructure
in many locations around the world
that currently don't have access
to low latency Internet,
and as a result,
treat geography as a new form of natural resource
that can lead to broader economic development.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)