there might be a point where Earth is habitable for humans, but the robots have consumed all the energy and material resources, and are thus unable to run
This seems backwards to me. If AI has run out of solar power and nuclear fusion power to sustain itself, Earth isn’t likely to be habitable for humans.
To clarify my own perspective, I’m suggesting that a plausible, if unlikely, “window of time” could exist where an advanced robotic civilization fails, but Earth remains habitable for humans. My thought experiment hinges on the idea that a high-tech society could be dependent on a specific non-renewable resource, like helium, that is irrelevant to subsistence-level human survival. In this scenario, a collapse due to resource deprivation wouldn’t prevent humans from returning to a pre-industrial way of life on a still-viable planet.
However, I’m too much of a pessimist to believe this is the likely outcome. It seems to me that the more developed a civilization becomes, the less plausible this scenario is. With greater development comes a vast cascade of resource interdependencies. To reach a technological level where a civilization could exhaust a resource as fundamental as helium would likely involve industrial output and environmental impact that would have already rendered the planet uninhabitable for humans. It’s possible that the window for a high-tech civilization to fail without taking the biosphere with it has already closed.
This seems backwards to me. If AI has run out of solar power and nuclear fusion power to sustain itself, Earth isn’t likely to be habitable for humans.
I agree with your central point.
To clarify my own perspective, I’m suggesting that a plausible, if unlikely, “window of time” could exist where an advanced robotic civilization fails, but Earth remains habitable for humans. My thought experiment hinges on the idea that a high-tech society could be dependent on a specific non-renewable resource, like helium, that is irrelevant to subsistence-level human survival. In this scenario, a collapse due to resource deprivation wouldn’t prevent humans from returning to a pre-industrial way of life on a still-viable planet.
However, I’m too much of a pessimist to believe this is the likely outcome. It seems to me that the more developed a civilization becomes, the less plausible this scenario is. With greater development comes a vast cascade of resource interdependencies. To reach a technological level where a civilization could exhaust a resource as fundamental as helium would likely involve industrial output and environmental impact that would have already rendered the planet uninhabitable for humans. It’s possible that the window for a high-tech civilization to fail without taking the biosphere with it has already closed.