SPACE INTERNET! You've probably already read that that's Elon Musk's latest adventure, and it's coming to a Redmond office near you. The PayPal entrepreneur came to the city a couple of weeks ago to explain why he'd be hiring "maybe a thousand" locals to build a fleet of internet-facilitating satellites between Earth and Mars.

The proposal has been snowballing interest and capital since Musk's first announcement. Google and Fidelity injected $1 billion into SpaceX, and Geekwire's wondering if local video game developers are about to receive job offers they can't refuse.

But why are techies so interested in building an internet for Mars? Not to be a downer for the sci-fi set, but colonizing the red planet isn't exactly a given in our lifetimes, or ever. Terrestrial internet could use quite a bit of help, too, judging by the stubborn differences in broadband speed and access along racial and economic lines. A recent survey, for example, found that nearly 90 percent of Seattleites feel high-speed internet access for all is important, but only a quarter of low-income households have cable internet (as opposed to DSL).

Space internet, as it happens, could better internet service here on Earth, and not necessarily how you think.

As Gizmodo explained last week, techies have been trying to build space internet networks since the '90s. Motorola's Iridium network, which launched nearly 70 satellites into space, went bankrupt soon after it started. Teledisic, another (literal) moonshot satellite internet idea backed by Bill Gates, failed, too. Both of these projects would have helped people in remote places communicate on Earth, but more recently, Google has been trying to connect people in isolated parts of the world to the internet by high-altitude balloon. Facebook also announced last year that it would be exploring drones, satellites, and lasers (lasers!) to expand everyone's Friend circles.

Google's Project Loon and Facebook's laser fantasies might do well to connect people without any internet to the web, but they wouldn't necessarily make anything easier for people in cities with infuriatingly slow connection speeds. Instead, making internet faster for people in cities could now happen in a couple of ways: municipal broadband (we're holding our breath on that one) and deflecting satellite internet signals to create stronger internet networks.

Researchers at the University of Washington have already demonstrated how devices might be able to communicate by absorbing radio frequency signals pulsing in the air around us. These devices wouldn't need any batteries—instead, they'd run on the rich "ambient backscatter" of signals already in existence. Like a radio-based ambient backscatter, the researchers say they might be able to one day bounce internet satellite signals from space into cities' slow-internet holes, or between towns.

"The satellite stuff would provide connectivity to a remote village," explains University of Washington engineer Joshua Smith. "Municipal broadband would be within that village. And a technology like ambient backscatter is really complementary to these other things. You could combine them. You could backscatter satellite signals, potentially."

Distributing the internet satellite signals could create a cottage industry here on Earth, maybe in Seattle. It's still a far-out idea, but maybe not as far-out as colonizing Mars.

"I think it’s great for [University of Washington] students, for the economy," says ambient backscatter co-creator Shyam Gollakota. "I think it’s going to have a very good multiplying effect where the types of startups were seeing here are going to be diversified because of this move."