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.
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.