Well, yes. Organized human civilizations go back 2000-3000 years. Industrial civilization at scale goes back less than 200. A useful starting point is the Live

Well, yes. Organized human civilizations go back 2000-3000 years. Industrial civilization at scale goes back less than 200. A useful starting point is the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1830). This the moment when the industrial revolution got out of beta, and, quite literally, picked up steam. Extractable natural resources are somewhat finite. Sometimes, with more inputs, you can get more output. Fracking is a modern example. An older example is taconite, the low-grade iron ore (15% iron) mined after the reserves of high-grade ore (65% iron) were exhausted.[2] Gold and rare earths are extracted at great expense from very low concentrations in the raw material. At some point, extraction in high volume becomes impracticable. We're only two hundred years into high-volume mined resource extraction. The USGS has a Critical Materials List.[3] Most of the current problems are political and commercial, not outright shortages. USGS lists known reserves for mined resources. Most have at least a century of known resources left, but not a millennium. On a time scale of civilizations, that's not long. Recycling is a battle against entropy. Almost all gold is recovered. About 80% of aluminum is recovered. About 60% of steel is recovered. Each time around, you lose some through dispersal into forms not easy to collect and recycle. So that, too, has a diminishing returns problem. Sometime in the future, perhaps closer than the distance in time since Oxford University was founded, most of the minerals will no longer be available in large quantity. It will be a slow, but difficult transition. Biological systems, though, mostly keep shuffling around C, H, O, and N. That's been working for over 300 million years now, pretty much recycling the same atoms. Long term, on the scale of millennia, systems running on the weaker bonds in that space can go on for millions of years. That's the default mode of planetary operation. Energy isn't a long-term problem because forms of energy are convertible, and wind and solar keep working as long as the sun does, at least if there are enough materials left to build generators. That looks like a long-term win on the scale of thousands of years. Millions, though... It's quite possible that industrial civilizations have a finite lifespan, bounded by material availability. Doesn't mean there can't be sentient civilizations. Or that they're limited to "nature". Biological systems can be engineered, too. But you don't get interstellar travel out of biology. Too low-powered. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railw... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taconite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taconite [3] https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/us-geological-survey-releases-2022-list-critical-minerals https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/us-geologica...