[JohnBooty]

    Another renaissance to recreate our civilization from 
    our published work would be nearly impossible. Or, 
    take centuries to accomplish.

It might not be possible at all.

We've long since used up the "easy" sources of energy on this planet - all of the fossil fuels conveniently located near the earth's surface have long been depleted. By the time they could possibly be replenished, the Sun will be nearing the end of its life. So we probably won't be bootstraping our way back to an advanced society via a second fossil fuel-powered industrial revolution similar to the first one.

The remaining energy sources are generally pretty tricky to harness.

For example, even if the knowledge to build nuclear reactors or solar panels is not lost during a civilization collapse, it will be awfully tough to actually get those power sources back online without an existing industrial infrastructure to mine/refine/transport all of the necessary ingredients.

If we get a "second chance" at this civilization thing, the road there is going to be insanely hard even if we're lucky enough to start out with all of the science-y stuff that our first civilization figured out eons ago.

[istinetz]

>By the time they could possibly be replenished, the Sun will be nearing the end of its life.

What? No. You're making shit up and passing it as fact.

>Most anthracite and bituminous coals occur within the 299- to 359.2-million-year-old strata of the Carboniferous Period, the so-called first coal age.

>Astronomers estimate that the sun has about 7 billion to 8 billion years left before it sputters out and dies.

There are several other completely made up things in your post.

[thombat]

However current theories of stellar evolution place the extinction of life on Earth in the range on hundreds of millions of years, due to the increase of its luminosity. For example here's a description of a better climate model [1] extending the time until the surface temperature reaches 70 degrees Celsius to one billion years, whereupon feedback of the water content of the atmosphere results in boiling away all liquid water.

So while the sun may be nowhere near the end of its life, the time of Earth lying in its "Goldilocks zone" is much shorter.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216142310.h...

[asdff]

Couldn't you just burn plastic directly? Mine a landfill and burn it up.

[ecpottinger]

Mine it with slave labour to separate the items, and you end up with glass, metals and plastics is amounts that would be worth a fortune to a roman level civilization.

We think of it as garbage, bur that garbage already represents a lot of energy already used to process them to that level.

[kbelder]

Not just to a Roman level civilization; I think it'll be immensely valuable to us in the near future. It's a treasure trove of materials, we just need better refining tech to separate out all the metals and rare earths, reprocess the plastic, etc.