Best way to check if there is internet?

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2022 at 06:41, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:
> But, as has been pointed out previously "if there is internet" is too
> vague a question to have an answer.
>
> If all you have is proxied access to outside HTTPS servers, then I
> would consider the answer to be "no", but most people would say "yes"
> they have internet.

Some day, we'll have people on Mars. They won't have TCP connections -
at least, not unless servers start supporting connection timeouts
measured in minutes or hours - but it wouldn't surprise me if some
sort of caching proxy system is deployed.

On the other hand, it also wouldn't surprise me if we do everything at
a high level instead - have a Martian PyPI mirror, Debian package
mirror, etc, etc, etc - and then build a mirror synchronization
protocol that uses UDP.

Either way, though: would a person on Mars "have the internet"? Yes,
but not the internet as we know it...

ChrisA