Clarifications (Re: Aquarius)

I've had a couple of email discussions about my Aquarius post earlier today, and I'll clarify some points.

Aquarius: an emergency lifeboat version of Gemini?

Aquarius was the name of the Lunar Module of Apollo 13 (in 1970).
"Emergency lifeboat" is a reference to how the Lunar Module was repurposed to serve as a minimal life support raft to conserve power. This is the most relevant instance of reducing power consumption in all of space travel to my knowledge.
I don't expect the collapse of society or any other real emergency, and I don't consider this protocol very useful for such a scenario. If there was an emergency, I expect to need very different things than network protocols. Theoretically the question of bootstrapping technology interests me, but I'm not interested in preparing for unusual circumstances.
Avian carriers is a reference to RFC 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service. It's an April fools' joke.
For distributing content without an always-on internet there are different good methods, sneakernet being a reference to them. There are protocols designed for this. I know of Scuttlebutt and IIRC there are plenty of ad hoc mesh network projects.

So plenty of the references are a bit tongue-in-the-cheek. But not everything.

It is possible to build computer hardware that runs for a decade on a single set of alkaline batteries, collecting data and sending it out over a radio connection many times a day.
The bottleneck for such use case is the use of radio bandwidth: the unnecessary round-trips that TCP introduces would significantly reduce battery life just because the radio needs to stay on much longer for every communication.

Finally, I don't consider Aquarius the hypothetical protocol useful for almost anything but I find some beauty in the idea. And I'm a geek who loves esoteric things so I might implement it just because.

I think TLS is a good match for Gemini: TLS and TCP go well together. I hope Aquarius could help people realize what giving up confidentiality and integrity means.