This truly is the scary thing. When you study the evolution of industry, it's been this back and forth between easily accessible resources (oil just sitting on top of sand in the desert, iron ore in river beds) driving technology which then enables getting at harder to access resources which drives more industry and so on.

If we had to reboot civilization, it would take geologic time, not biologic time, since all of the easy to access resources that our ancestors used to bootstrap civilization have been depleted.