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.
