Online gaming between Earth and Mars will be laggy as hell

We know that not everyone was blessed with knowledge of aeronautical physics and interplanetary telecommunications, so we'll try and keep this simple. A recent Edge Online article examined the possibility of online multiplayer matches between human Earthlings and human Martians — as one might expect, the future of galactic Left 4 Dead bouts looks pretty grim.

First off, NASA's two Martian orbiters, through which information is relayed to Earth, can only transfer a single megabit of data per second. Worse still, these orbiters only work in 15 minute increments before they must be repositioned — a process that takes hours. Furthermore, bandwidth is unsurprisingly limited on the Red Planet — messages between Earth and Mars usually suffer 4 – 20 minutes of lag, depending on the positions of the conversing planets.

Check out the full article for even more interesting tidbits about extraterrestrial multiplayer. It's all a bit pointless, though. From what we've recently learned, folks on Mars are far too busy causing property damage to play any video games.