If we woke up tomorrow and...
kellishaver: I think you would see a large drop in population before we were able to rebuild. Population growth only occurs when the technology can support it.If we were starting over without any of the knowledge we have now, then it seems reasonable to assume that it would take roughly the same amount of time.If we had history to look back on, then maybe we would be looking at a few hundred years instead of a few thousand.I think the more interesting question is, if we had the knowledge of our past history to look back on, what would we do differently? Would we be more green from the start, for instance? A lot of the problems with adapting to green tech today isn't that the technology is necessarily so knew and unknown, it's that well-established infrastructures and systems are in place that are implemented on vastly different technologies and the cost/logistics of replacing them is prohibitive.