The Great Packet Trip
Chapter 1
About 4 minutes. Voices were made with ElevenLabs. The music box is played live by your browser. Turn Voices off to read the captions together at your own pace; each line still moves on by itself.
Where the facts come from
- Light in a glass fiber: Jeff Hecht, Understanding Fiber Optics, 5th ed. (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006). Light stays in the core by bouncing off its walls (total internal reflection) and travels at about two-thirds of its speed in a vacuum, roughly 200,000 km per second.
- Around the Earth five times a second: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Earth Fact Sheet. The equatorial radius is 6,378 km, so once around is about 40,075 km, and 200,000 ÷ 40,075 ≈ 5.
- Packets with addresses, put back in order: J. Postel, RFC 791, Internet Protocol (IETF, 1981), and W. Eddy, ed., RFC 9293, Transmission Control Protocol (IETF, 2022).
- The neighborhood node, radio channels on copper, and the modem's log (timeouts, loss of sync): CableLabs, DOCSIS 3.1 Physical Layer Specification (CM-SP-PHYv3.1) and MAC and Upper Layer Protocols Interface Specification (CM-SP-MULPIv3.1), cablelabs.com/specifications.
- Wi-Fi is light we can't see: NASA Science, Tour of the Electromagnetic Spectrum (NASA, 2010), on radio waves.
- Why it all works: James Clerk Maxwell, "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 155 (1865): 459–512. The four-equation form shown in the story is Oliver Heaviside's later compact rewriting: Electromagnetic Theory, vol. 1 (The Electrician, 1893).
- Scripture: Colossians 1:17, English Standard Version.
- Made with: hand-written JavaScript on an HTML canvas; voices from ElevenLabs, including real child-character voices for the kids; music played live by the browser's Web Audio. Thanks to Charles Wu, whose Next Stop: Space! showed that a whole story can be drawn in code.