There isn’t much more except that I got the impression that people in EA who have thought about this a lot think recovery is very likely, and I’m mostly deferring to them. The section about extinction risk is the part of my post where I feel the least knowledgeable. As for additional object-level arguments, I initially wasn’t aware of points such as crops and animals already being cultivated/domesticated, metals already mined, and there being alternatives to rapid growth induced by fossil fuels, one of which being slow but steady growth over longer time periods. The way cultural evolution works is that slight improvements from innovations (which are allowed to be disjunctive rather than having to rely on developing a very specific technology) spread everywhere, which makes me think that large populations + a lot of time should go far enough eventually. Note also that if all-out extinction is simply very unlikely to ever happen, then you have several attempts left to reach technological maturity again.
There isn’t much more except that I got the impression that people in EA who have thought about this a lot think recovery is very likely, and I’m mostly deferring to them. The section about extinction risk is the part of my post where I feel the least knowledgeable. As for additional object-level arguments, I initially wasn’t aware of points such as crops and animals already being cultivated/domesticated, metals already mined, and there being alternatives to rapid growth induced by fossil fuels, one of which being slow but steady growth over longer time periods. The way cultural evolution works is that slight improvements from innovations (which are allowed to be disjunctive rather than having to rely on developing a very specific technology) spread everywhere, which makes me think that large populations + a lot of time should go far enough eventually. Note also that if all-out extinction is simply very unlikely to ever happen, then you have several attempts left to reach technological maturity again.