Vinton Cerf, known as the father of the Internet, said on Wednesday that the Web was outgr

owing the planet Earth and the time had come to take the information superhighway to outer space.

"The Internet is growing quickly, and we still have a lot of work to do to cover the planet", Cerf told the first day of the annual conference of the Internet Society in Geneva where more than 1,500 cyberspace fans have gathered to seek answers to questions about the tangled web of the Internet

Cerf believed that it would soon be possible to send real-time science data on the Internet from a space mission orbiting another planet such as Mars. "There is now an effort under way to design and build an interplanetary Internet. The space research community is coming closer and closer and merging. We think that we will see interplanetary Internet networks that look very much like the ones we use today. We will need interplanetary gateways and there will be protocols to transmit data between these gateways", Cerf said.

Francois Fluekiger, a scientist attending the conference from the European Particle Physics Laboratory near Geneva, was not entirely convinced, saying. "We need dreams like this. But I don't know any Martian whom I'd like to communicate with through the Internet".

Cerf has been working with NASA's Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory—the people behind the recent Mars expedition—to design what he calls an "interplanetary Internet protocol" He believes that astronauts will want to use the Internet, although special problems remain with interference and delay.

"This is quite real. The effort is becoming extraordinarily concrete over the next few months because the next Mars mission is in planning stages now", Cerf told the conference.

"If we use domain names like Earth or Mars jet propulsion laboratory people would be coming together with people from the Internet community. ' He added.

"The idea is to take the interplanetary Internet design and make it a part of the infrastructure of the Mars mission".

He later told a news conference that designing this system now would prepare mankind of future technological advances.

"The whole ides is to create an architecture so the design works anywhere. I don't know where we're going to have to put it but my guess is that we'll be going out there some time", Cerf said.

"If you think 100 years from now, it is entirely possible that what will be purely research 50 years from now will become commercialized".

According to Cerf, the purpose to design interplanetary Internet is to

A．send real-time science data.

B．communicate with astronauts.

C．lay foundation for future technological advances.

D．commercialize it