I know the joke here is that we’re just in an endless cycle, but if this happened now and we reverted to stone age sun god worshippers, we’d find it a LOT harder to redevelop modern technology. We’ve literally plundered the reachable raw materials in the ground, and scoured the biomes.
The biomes would eventually recover (and become something new), but all that nice reachable coal is gone. We may not make it if that happens.
This is along the lines of a solution I propose to the Fermi paradox.
If we fuck up the planet or ourselves, having already gone through most of the readily available materials necessary for tech… yep, you get caught in an extremely slow tech tree grind after that.
If that kind if thing is common (our only example of civilization tech progression is ourselves), then it would not be surprising to me if there are many alien worlds with sapient life, but theyre basically the equivalent of Stellaris Primitives on Tomb Worlds.
](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6f607a48-4738-4625-b321-950b91e93130.png){kind=link}
Yeah. We’re probably the only civilization that can arise on earth. Unless new species develop something truly unique.