I remember a short story posted on LW a few years ago about this. It was told from the perspective of people in a society of pre-industrial tech, wondering how (or even if) their mythical ancestors did these magical feats like riding around in steel carriages faster than any horse and things like that. The moral being that society hadn't reached the required "escape velocity" to develop large-scale space travel and instead had declined once the fossil fuels ran out, never to return.

I can't for the life of me find it though.