Who Needs Infrastructure? (II)

Commenters on the earlier post having raised several good points, I decided to write a follow-up rather than attempt to provide individual responses.

I should first say something general about technological advance and prediction horizons. Due to the immense effects of nanomachinery, as hazardous as near-future speculation may be, it becomes extraordinarily difficult more than about 20 years out. What interests me in this context is what can be done with “bulk technology” before the transition to nanotech, and how many of the developments forecast by Drexler et al may occur relatively gradually and in unlikely places, rather than swiftly and obviously emanating from North America or some other high-technology region. Jim notes the potential of the combination of desktop fabricators and satellite links. I believe that few people on Earth will see more change in the next generation than young Haitians.

On solar energy and stored energy, I write with some trepidation, knowing that several Chicago Boyz have considerable knowledge of these issues.
Not enough trepidation, however, to refrain entirely. Coincidentally, the ratio, ≈40:1, of per capita GDP in the US to that of Haiti closely resembles the HTGUSD exchange rate. This provides a handy way of imagining your circumstances as a typical Haitian: just think of how you would live if you were being paid, and whatever you owned was worth, the same number of gourdes as you now get/own in dollars.
At that rate (literally), much-touted installed photovoltaic systems at $≈1 W^-1 are G≈40 W^-1 and need to drop by over 1 ½ orders of magnitude to become analogously affordable to Haitians. A best-case Moore’s Law-type relationship would halve the price every 18 months and get us there in 8 years; a pessimistic halving only every 5 years gets us there in 27 years. The geometric mean of the two cases is less than 15 years, allowing me to blithely predict ubiquitous household-based solar power units throughout Haiti in the mid-2020s.
Thermal energy would indeed be abundant at least 8 hours a day year-round. Stirling-cycle engines seem like an obvious possibility, and used as heat pumps would be good for air conditioning, which is available only to the very wealthiest Haitians now.
Energy-storage systems already exist in every substantial Haitian building; they’re just kludgy racks of car batteries and inverters. In a spectacularly useless attempt at rationing, the electric utility in Petit-Goâve routes power to the central business district (such as it is) during the day, then switches it over to more residential areas at night. There is absolutely no net gain from this, because everybody draws twice as much power as they ordinarily would while the electricity’s on in order to charge up their batteries for the 12 hours out of 24 when it’s off. Most buildings also have generators, mostly small gasoline engines, with a few larger diesel units. I don’t know what the main power plant uses; I’m guessing natural gas simply because I saw no sign of a coal-fired plant anywhere.
Anyway, again I see this as a matter of incremental improvements rather than a single big breakthrough. A reasonable assumption is that price:performance of power-storage mechanisms will halve every few years and at least keep pace with affordability of solar power.

The Maine island house that Tatyana linked to indeed addresses many of these challenges. Replicating it in Haiti would be simultaneously made much easier by the labor rates ($≈1.50 day^-1 for the most basic tasks) and much harder by the unavailability of lumber; nearly all permanent construction in Haiti is done with concrete. It would be a fascinating exercise to get some Yankee-workshop types together with Haitians and see what they could come up with.

A proper response to Randall’s insights deserves its own post, but I’ll try to fit it in here anyway.

The internet backbone in Haiti consists of microwave links east over the mountains into the Dominican Republic, where it eventually hits undersea fiber. Rumor has it that there is a fiber-optic cable running into Baie de Port-au-Prince, and that the earthquake knocked it out of service. Rumor has many things in Haiti. I saw satellite dishes and antennas everywhere, most of them nonfunctioning. Even conducting a comprehensive inventory of technological assets in that country would be a huge accomplishment.
There are, however, such things as gigabit radio links (“E-band”), which could provide high weather availability (99.9%) over distances of a few kilometers even in the rainy Haitian environment. The combination of nearby mountains and high population density could actually make this more economical than in many places in the US. Free-space optics using lasers and photodiodes may be a more distant possibility.
I do not for a moment mean to imply that Haiti is, as of 2011, anything other than Ballardian in its dysfunctionality, and not only as regards electric power. Ubiquitous purified water and insect control alone (a simple matter of screened windows and indoor spraying of DDT) would probably add close to a decade to life expectancy. A cultural fear of going on the water results in a fishing industry much smaller than would be expected, with associated absence of an excellent source of nutrition in most people’s diets. Trap a few thousand Americans in a place like Carrefour and in a matter of hours they would be organizing themselves into work brigades to build sanitation systems, with their bare hands if necessary.
Nor did I necessarily mean to extol the virtues of somehow living apart from society; I cordially detest survivalist fantasies and would direct anyone enamored of “self-sufficiency” to its well-deserved evisceration in The Rational Optimist. In any case, living in splendid isolation is not something that very many people will ever do in a country whose population density already exceeds 300 km^-2 (≈ Massachusetts), one full order of magnitude higher than that of a typical US state.
But whatever their material conditions and cultural idiosyncracies (customer service is atrocious), Haitians seem as individually technophilic as Americans. It is that tendency, combined with technological cost curves, that is certain to bring drastic but unequal and frequently (by Western standards) bizarre change to Haitian lifestyles in the near future. William Gibson has notoriously written that “the future is here it’s just not evenly distributed.” That distribution in Haiti may be characterized by someone living in a tent, next door to their intact house which they have nonetheless been afraid to set foot in for fifteen months since the earthquake, regularly visiting a cyber café … to use a computer with a QWERTY keyboard and English-language OS and applications in a country whose official languages are French and Kreyòl. The strangeness has only begun.