If people had less access to high voltage electricity, but many sources for low voltage DC (24V and under)
Would it still be possible to manufacture silicon conductors using more people and different machines?
Basically, could you do it with machines powered by small batteries?
eg. off the grid.
@futurebird I'm not sure how you'd lack access to higher voltages. Voltage multipliers, transformers, etc. are easy to do. Of course if you mean lacking access to high wattage, that could make all sorts of energy intensive manufacturing difficult...
It's a badly phrased way of asking if one could make semiconductors out in the desert with older solar panels and batteries. How grid dependent is it?
But I think the materials may be an even bigger problem.
@futurebird @dalias interesting tangent: what kinds of cool ways could you apply modern CS knowledge without semiconductors or even circuits?
I'm thinking modern-style distributed computing algorithms, but where the nodes are just humans doing highschool-level calculations possibly using slide rules or other mechanical calculators.
Also since you specifically started this thread: human/ant interfaces where the humans sprinkle sugar patterns to feet the ants to compute stuff for them, or something like that.
