Roko comments on Why safety is not safe - Less Wrong
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Not necessarily. When the last petroleum is refined, rest assured that the tanks and warplanes will be the very last vehicles to run out of gas. And bullets will continue to be produced long after it is no longer possible to buy a steel fork.
Your belief that something like present technological advancement could continue after a cataclysmic collapse boggles my mind. The one historical precedent we have - the Dark Ages - teaches the exact opposite lesson. Reversion to barbarism - and a barbarism armed with the remnants of the finest modern weaponry, this time around - is the more likely outcome.
Not necessarily. To be blunt, we've basically exhausted practically all the useful non-renewal natural resources (ores, etc.) that a civilization could access with 1200s-level technology. They'd have to mine our ruins for metals and such - and much of it is going to be locked up in forms that are completely useless.
Of course it's nowhere near the guaranteed -- notice, for example, that I excluded all other catastrophic risks from consideration in that scenario, such as crazy wars for scraps, only looking at the effects of shortage of resources stopping much of the industry, because of dependencies that weren't ensured.