Story Time!

So we are discussing the joke that IPoAC is still faster than @DefaultAlex’s internet connection. This got us all thinking about how useful a Pigeon would be for transfering data.

So, how would we attach data to a pigeon? MicroSD cards!

Straight up asking your popular search engine this question returns pretty much nothing so we thought we’d actually calculate it. How hard could it be??

A typical pigeon can carry about 10% of it’s weight safely. The average pigeon is 300-500 grams which means we have a range of 30-50 grams of weight capacity.

A MicroSD card weighs in at about 0.25g so in the best case senario, we can get 120-200 MicroSD cards attached to a pigeon. If we go with 512GB cards, we’re talking 60-100TB of raw capacity.

We don’t want to loose any of this data so we would probably need a RAID6 setup. So we’re down to 59-99TB of raw capacity. That’s still a lot though!

So this poses a few new questions…

How would we calculate the bandwidth of the connection?How do we protect the data?Would we need to make a RAID array of pigeons to ensure no packet loss? If so, how the hell do you RAID6 a pigeon?Does bird flu impact the transfer rate? If so, would that technically be a computer virus now?What’s the packet loss of a pigeon?

Next Week: We discuss sending encryption keys via Foxes.