> any surviving humans won't be able to restart it because we've already used all of the "easy" fossil fuels.
How much fuel do we need to restart a society, assuming we still have knowledge left over? Could a seed of a technological society start at hydroelectric dams, or in places where solar infrastructure still exists?
There's an interesting Youtube channel "Primitive Technology"[0]. Note how pretty much every technology involves fire. This is prehistoric tech-level, and it already won't scale to modern population sizes without fossil fuels. Trees aren't enough[1]. Modern technology is even more energy intensive.
Modern population sizes are unlikely to be sustained past a hypothetic apocalypse and a rebirth of technology is unlikely to include a large part of the survivors. The question is how many hands you need at least to bootstrap from society's scrap metal back to a sustainable technology stack.
According to Guns, Germs, and Steel, a population of 4,000 humans living in Tasmania were cutoff from contact with the mainland after the Bass Straight flooded 10,000 years ago.
In this extreme isolation, they regressed beyond even stone-age technology, including losing knowledge of how to catch fish or start fires.
why would you jump all of the way back to prehistoric tech? a lot of modern (and fairly green) tech would be pretty easy to salvage. manufacturing some of this stuff is pretty involved, but i don't think we will have to start all the way over.
How much fuel do we need to restart a society, assuming we still have knowledge left over? Could a seed of a technological society start at hydroelectric dams, or in places where solar infrastructure still exists?