[toddh]

A question I've had about this is where are the ready supplies of materials that could be used in the recreation? Could we spread across the hills and still find iron and copper deposits? Aren't these all played out by now? We would need to shift to another economic base from new materials I think rather than recreate what we had before, because that's gone.

[kragen]

Well, if the artifacts actually disappeared, yes. But if they just got buried somewhere until they rusted into unusability, we could dig up the rust and smelt it.

[btilly]

According to http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/11/building-a-telegrap... the materials still exist, at least in sufficient amounts to build a simple telegraph.