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I've seen that argument made many times, to be frank it's not actually as well founded as it seems. This is because it confuses two very different things: ease

I've seen that argument made many times, to be frank it's not actually as well founded as it seems. This is because it confuses two very different things: ease of production of natural resources and cost effectiveness of production of natural resources. In the early stages of industrialization ease of production is paramount, but in later stages quality, production volume, and per unit cost is paramount. Early resources can be very much more expensive to produce and very much lower quality (as they were historically) and yet still be viable. Take coal for example. A small coal mine near the surface can be a quite viable source of coal in early industry, but such coal mines would not be economical in the modern era. Because modern coal is higher quality, much higher volume production, and mined out of areas where it is generally most amenable to industrialized production. There is an old abandoned coal mine within walking distance of me right now, I've been there and picked up coal off the surface of the ground. There's still literally tons of coal there that could be mined quite easily by hand. But compared to other sources of coal in the 21st century it's simply not economical to bother worrying about trying to extract it to depletion. And the same exact principles apply to essentially every other natural resource. For example, we no longer mine bog iron because it's a very manual labor intensive work compared to, say, shoveling hematite sand into rail cars. Additionally, this argument ignores the fact that vast amounts of resources will exist in the form of remnants of our present civilization (only the tiniest fraction of which will be vaporized by nuclear explosions). Huge amounts of iron, aluminum, glass, etc. will be left over, short-cutting the normal production process as for pre-industrial processes. Re-industrialization after a collapse will be different than past industrialization but I see no indications that it will be very much more difficult and certainly not impossible.

Houshalter 12y ago
Civilizations have collapsed before from far less serious disasters. From Mayans to Mediterranean civilizations (several of them actually) to the 5 centuries of decline and stagnation of China, and probably countless more I haven't read about. And the industrial world is far less resilient. We depend on huge amounts of infrastructure and massively complex systems of trade and production. Very likely we would return to subsistence farming. There would be little or no remaining industry, and not enough resources to support it. Generations would go by with little technological progress. Metal would rust away, buildings collapse, forests regrow, and after awhile there wouldn't be much left of our civilization. (This is of course assuming a worst case scenario where the whole world is bombed or a nuclear winter happens.) When we did finally get around to trying to rebuild civilization, sure there would be some scattered resource deposits around the world, but not enough to do anything with. You can't build steam engines without perfecting metallurgy and abundance of cheap, strong, metal. You need to produce many tons of cheap coal, not just scattered surface deposits. The industrial revolution started when deep underground mining became possible by pumping out water, and those mines are exhausted or lost.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Even when the entire Mediterranean Bronze age civilization collapsed catastrophically with people starving to death, cities burning, widespread brutal and chaotic warfare, and obliteration of conventional social structures the civilizations still bounced back in a few centuries, sometimes in less than a single century. And that's without widespread literacy and widespread availability of printed knowledge (as we have today). Yet out of the ashes of those civilizations the Iron age arose, and an unprecedented flourishing of scientific inquiry occurred in greece, egypt, and elsewhere. All of that without a previous roadmap of knowledge, and struggling to rebuild the shattered pieces of civilization. Rebuilding civilization from a more modern collapse would almost certainly transpire differently. For one modern subsistence crops are superior to those of the Mediterranean bronze age. We have potatoes, corn, yams, high yield wheat and hybrids (like triticale), etc. We also know better techniques for farming like use of cover crops, crop rotation, etc. Some aspects of modern, industrialized civilization are tenuous (like worldwide inter-continental freight shipping), others are simply insights or knowledge gained through hard work that doesn't need to be repeated. Such as even the general idea of the movable type printing press, or literacy, or the germ theory of disease, or food preservation via canning, and so on. A modern person with a little bit of knowledge transported back 2 or even 3 thousand years could change the way people live their lives at a fundamental level. Boiling water and pasteurizing milk before drinking it are things that have been possible since antiquity. As would be canning of various foods, enabling preservation of fruits, vegetables, and meats harvested in the summer through the winter or through several years. That sort of thing transforms the basic subsistence equation enormously and massively accelerates the amount of time it would take to return to some degree of modernity and industrialization. Not to mention the huge transformation due merely to the ideas of rewarding individuals for their labor and their inventions, the idea of the scientific method, and the process of advancing knowledge and technology in general. All of which were stunted historically because people didn't know any better, just as people didn't know to wash their hands or boil their water.
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    Yes civilizations bounced back in the past, but not industrialized ones. I have no doubt eventually people will build new cities and civilization. But they won't be industrialized. They won't have access to natural resources like we did when we industrialized. Some information might survive, but it will be mostly useless without the resources or established infrastructure to use it. Over the generations, more and more of the knowledge we've accumulated will be lost. The culture will change further and further from the one that led to our civilization.

Houshalter 12y ago

Civilizations have collapsed before from far less serious disasters. From Mayans to Mediterranean civilizations (several of them actually) to the 5 centuries of decline and stagnation of China, and probably countless more I haven't read about. And the industrial world is far less resilient. We depend on huge amounts of infrastructure and massively complex systems of trade and production. Very likely we would return to subsistence farming. There would be little or no remaining industry, and not enough resources to support it. Generations would go by with little technological progress. Metal would rust away, buildings collapse, forests regrow, and after awhile there wouldn't be much left of our civilization. (This is of course assuming a worst case scenario where the whole world is bombed or a nuclear winter happens.) When we did finally get around to trying to rebuild civilization, sure there would be some scattered resource deposits around the world, but not enough to do anything with. You can't build steam engines without perfecting metallurgy and abundance of cheap, strong, metal. You need to produce many tons of cheap coal, not just scattered surface deposits. The industrial revolution started when deep underground mining became possible by pumping out water, and those mines are exhausted or lost.

InclinedPlane 12y ago
Even when the entire Mediterranean Bronze age civilization collapsed catastrophically with people starving to death, cities burning, widespread brutal and chaotic warfare, and obliteration of conventional social structures the civilizations still bounced back in a few centuries, sometimes in less than a single century. And that's without widespread literacy and widespread availability of printed knowledge (as we have today). Yet out of the ashes of those civilizations the Iron age arose, and an unprecedented flourishing of scientific inquiry occurred in greece, egypt, and elsewhere. All of that without a previous roadmap of knowledge, and struggling to rebuild the shattered pieces of civilization. Rebuilding civilization from a more modern collapse would almost certainly transpire differently. For one modern subsistence crops are superior to those of the Mediterranean bronze age. We have potatoes, corn, yams, high yield wheat and hybrids (like triticale), etc. We also know better techniques for farming like use of cover crops, crop rotation, etc. Some aspects of modern, industrialized civilization are tenuous (like worldwide inter-continental freight shipping), others are simply insights or knowledge gained through hard work that doesn't need to be repeated. Such as even the general idea of the movable type printing press, or literacy, or the germ theory of disease, or food preservation via canning, and so on. A modern person with a little bit of knowledge transported back 2 or even 3 thousand years could change the way people live their lives at a fundamental level. Boiling water and pasteurizing milk before drinking it are things that have been possible since antiquity. As would be canning of various foods, enabling preservation of fruits, vegetables, and meats harvested in the summer through the winter or through several years. That sort of thing transforms the basic subsistence equation enormously and massively accelerates the amount of time it would take to return to some degree of modernity and industrialization. Not to mention the huge transformation due merely to the ideas of rewarding individuals for their labor and their inventions, the idea of the scientific method, and the process of advancing knowledge and technology in general. All of which were stunted historically because people didn't know any better, just as people didn't know to wash their hands or boil their water.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Yes civilizations bounced back in the past, but not industrialized ones. I have no doubt eventually people will build new cities and civilization. But they won't be industrialized. They won't have access to natural resources like we did when we industrialized. Some information might survive, but it will be mostly useless without the resources or established infrastructure to use it. Over the generations, more and more of the knowledge we've accumulated will be lost. The culture will change further and further from the one that led to our civilization.