The direction we're headed, it's a perpetual stone age until humanity is a footnote in some spacefaring civilization's notes about this star system.
All the surface metals have been mined. The easily-accessible stored energy (coal, shallow oil) is gone. If there's a collapse, we can't bootstrap ourselves up a second time. We're done, nuclear fallout or no.
I'll settle for nothing less than la belle epoque.
The direction we're headed, it's a perpetual stone age until humanity is a footnote in some spacefaring civilization's notes about this star system.
All the surface metals have been mined. The easily-accessible stored energy (coal, shallow oil) is gone. If there's a collapse, we can't bootstrap ourselves up a second time. We're done, nuclear fallout or no.