Once it collapses, it won't rise again to even an industrial level civilization. Iron ore, copper, coal are no longer easy-accessible. Can't have a new industrial age without those.
We probably need a Foundation (Asimov).
That is far from certainty. Industrialization depended on having easy and abundant access to natural resources like coal, oil, and various metals. We've exhausted the easy deposits of these resources, the ones a preindustrial civilization could get to.
If civilization were to collapse now, it may never rise again.
Any future civilization won't have access to easily available natural resources. All the coal, ores and oil that exists can only be extracted with heavy machinery that couldn't be replicated without the easy stuff that we've already consumed.
If our civilization collapses, whatever comes after will have a very difficult time becoming industrialized.
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.
If our current civilization collapses, I think it’s unlikely that another similar one would arise- or if it did it would happen much more slowly. There are no more easily accessible seams of rich ores of any kind in the world; the deposits remaining require a lot of energy and technology to use since they are low grade ores and it would be very difficult to get to a high enough technology level to use them without already having the refined minerals. A chicken and egg problem.
The twist is that if we collapse we will most likely never come back since we already burned all the easy to reach fuel. Can't go from bronze age to CPUs without an industrial revolution somewhere in between
Exhausted all the minerals? Pfft, who cares about minerals when refined alloys and other recyclable materials are all over. The parking lots of one USA town has more metal than the (few) survivors of any civilazation collapsing level event could even use.
Also, civilization existed before the industrial revolution. In fact that would be a good point to mark the start of the fall. Giving the rate of increase in pollution, overconsumption, climate and environment destruction since and before then.
The problem if we collapse as a society is we have exhausted all the surface minerals and fossil fuels. If we collapse back to the Neolithic we can never climb back out of the hole. As a species we are one and done.
I don't understand. You're saying that because we've made a lot of stuff, if our civilisation collapses it'll destroy everything? How does one follow from the other?
I don't have a citation, but I've read that if we fall, we won't get back up. The easily mineable metals, minerals and fuel sources have been used up - starting again from scratch would be incredibly difficult.
(Larry Niven addresses this somewhat in his novel The Mote In God's Eye. I can't really elaborate without spoilers. :P)
If society collapses even for just one generation, that's the end game. There isn't enough readily available energy available on the surface to restart society. We depend on large amounts of energy and energy requiring infrastructure to get the remaining oil and gas to the surface for consumption. China might have enough accessible coal (I simply don't know) but if there is a societal collapse for a generation or so and if they do have accessible coal today it's likely to be sufficiently valuable in the interregnum that it too will be stripmined away before society is able to try to recover. (Solar, wind, and energy all take far too much education to get running at large scale, and educated individuals are likely to be in equally short supply of society collapses for a generation).
We have to keep society running. We won't have the energetics to get it started again if it stops.
I can imagine a scenario where civilization collapses and humankind exists in a permanent dark age without abundant oil to launch a new industrial revolution.
Edit: Another alternative is technology progresses but political and cultural institutions do not, so the requisite level of global cooperation never materializes.
You won't need to prospect for iron or copper if civilization collapsed, the fact of the matter is we could never be "bombed back to the stone age" as there is soooo much processed iron just lying around - everywhere.
Surely any post-collapse society could just mine the cities for metals. And presumably with a much reduced population there would be plenty of arable land for growing oil bearing crops obviating the need for most fossil fuels.
There's some speculation that a collapse of civilization at our current point would be difficult to undo, as we've mined a whole bunch of the easily accessible stuff and have to delve miles underground or sift through megatons of ore for the rest.
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