πŸ¦‘.fun -

Economics

An interesting idea that I read, rephrased, & named; Though I lack the knowledge to evaluate its accuracy - "Resource Extraction: 1st Time's a charm":
When the industrial revolution was taking place, the methods of extracting resources were primitive compared to today. But they worked just fine because so many resouces were easily accessible. Coal used to simply sit on the surface, and many metals could be taken from surface rocks. Gold could be semi-easily panned in many places around the world (e.g. the California Gold Rush). Oil was abundant and actually leaking to the surface in rich areas.

Now imagine that technology failed and humanity lost all of its progress; Humanity is set back to the iron age, 100x worse than the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

There is no way for humanity to recover to the current technological level, because now to get oil or metal or coal, you need to dig so deep into the Earth that humans can't really do it without machines that already use the resources they mine/extract.

Thus, with no stable energy source and no way of ever achieving one, humanity will stagnate and populations will be decimated due to starvation, natural disaster, and/or disease. If we falter even one step, humanity is doomed. There is no redo. No going back to simpler times and then marching forward. This is it: we reach higher and better energy sources or we die in mud huts as a species.