Why hobbyist quadcopters won’t fight malaria
Posted in 2013 to the Overcoming Bias NYC mailing list — the New York meetup arm of the LessWrong rationalist community, often a venue for effective-altruism brainstorming — in response to a thread proposing that hobbyist quadcopters could be used to distribute malaria interventions (such as insecticide-treated bednets) to remote villages in sub-Saharan Africa. The reply walks through four practical reasons that plan would not work in 2013.
Making quadcopters is easy enough (there are a number of people selling kits), but applying that to the malaria problem sounds hard.
First, quadcopters are expensive ($500 is entry-level), and that will go way up if the design gets larger or more complicated.
Secondly, flight time will be severely limited by battery capacity — there’s a reason commercial copters use gasoline and not Li-Ions for energy storage. Eg.
this kit has a “long range” copter with a flight time of twenty minutes on one battery (for $3,000). You could theoretically extend this with methanol or other hydrocarbon fuels, but this makes the engines much bigger (and heavier), more expensive, more complicated, etc.
Thirdly, hobbyist radio signals are short range (hundreds of meters), and doing anything longer range requires powerful transmitters/receivers and mechanisms to avoid interference from all the nearby devices. You can use GPS for location tracking, but anywhere that’s without roads and is impassable to ATVs presumably also lacks cellular data service, which is the standard solution to this problem in the US.
Fourthly, in the parts of Africa we’re talking about, anything you let out of your sight is likely to get stolen — not even by criminals, but just people wanting to buy some food without having a reliable income. It’s common for copper wiring or lead pipes to get stripped from buildings for sale on the scrap metal market, which makes infrastructure really hard to maintain. Forget about expensive electronics. Eg. here’s Wikitravel’s advice for going to South Africa: … never walk around in deserted areas at night or advertise posession of money and expensive accessories.
Do not accept offers from friendly strangers. Do not wear jewellery or expensive watches. Do not wear a tummy bag with all your valuables, consider a concealed money belt worn under your shirt instead. Distribute your valuables in inside pockets and other pockets. A decoy wallet may also be worth considering. Leave Passports and other valuables in a safe or other secure location. Do not carry large sums of money. Do not walk by night in deserted places. Hide that you are a tourist: conceal your camera and binoculars. Do not leave your valuables in plain sight when driving in your car, as “smash and grab” attacks do sometimes occur at intersections, and keep your car doors locked, and windows closed. Know where to go so that you avoid getting lost or needing a map: that will avoid signs.
If you are carrying bags, try and hook them under a table or chair leg when sitting down, this will prevent them from being snatched. (…) Operators at the airport steal valuable objects such as iPods, laptops, digital cameras, cellular phones and jewelry while scanning the checked-in luggage of passengers. They take advantage of the scanner machine to detect valuable objects and steal them. These events occur everyday and the stolen items include anything from electronic devices to designer perfumes. Assume any obviously valuable objects in your checked bags will be stolen and pack accordingly.
Place any items of value in carry-on luggage, remembering that more than 100ml of lotion and other liquids are not allowed to be taken in carry-on luggage. If you cannot fit both your laptop and your digital camera in your carry-on bag, then one or the other is too big. Unless you are a professional photographer, this is not the country to bring your desktop replacement laptop with 17-inch screen and Canon Rebel camera with telephoto lens.
When checking in at OR Tambo the check-in attendant will remind you not to place valuable items in your luggage. A service to wrap luggage in cling-wrap film is available at the airport. Others cable-tie the zip fasteners together to deter easy access to the contents of luggage. Expect no sympathy or compensation from the airline if your items go missing…