What's scary about this is that we're basically already at this point with things like Voyager. The only way to solve problems on the probes is to upload new code to them. Some of the folks who fixed the communication problem in 2024 are well beyond retirement age; some of the folks that designed the Voyager probes are dead and gone.

As @tal@lemmy.today pointed out, TCP/IP was standardized in 1982. The knowledge of the people who built the founding protocols of the Internet is fading, and here in 2026 the system built on top has grown so complex that no one really understands all of it. If you thought link rot was bad, just wait, in a decade or so we're going to see some serious infrastructure rot. The Internet will increasingly have the kind of legacy problems that Windows does, where Microsoft is forced to sustain old bad features because users are dependent on them. We can't even get rid of TLS 1.0. There are still telnet endpoints exposed to the Internet, in production use.