Many people follow an erroneous line of reasoning on this, though it's understandable because there's some subtlety and complexity involved.
We have been exploiting natural resources like crazy, which has depleted and will deplete many reserves over time, but not all reserves. Most importantly, the reserves that get exploited change over time due to capacity, cost effectiveness, and so on. Which means that there are many instances where particular reserves stop being exploited before they've been depleted, usually because they are too small or not high enough quality or too expensive to be competitive on the market.
Take coal, for example. There is still a huge amount of coal in easily mined locations all around the world that is not currently being used. If civilization had to "reboot" they could easily make use of those sources of coal. They aren't being used at present because they aren't competitive, they can't produce the volume of coal at the prices and of the quality that the market demands currently. But there's still tons of coal out there that you can basically just walk up to and dig out of the ground with a shovel. To some degree that same situation exists with a lot of other resources as well (such as iron ore).
Petroleum is perhaps the most likely resource to be depleted in the future, but even in that case there are still lots of smaller reserves that are easy to exploit but are not because they're too small or too expensive.
Realistically the early stages of an industrial revolution in a civilizational reboot wouldn't be significantly constrained, but later stages might be, though at that point they'd have options to work around it (for example, gasification of coal, earlier recycling, migration to non-fossil fuel power sources during early phases, and so on).
I keep thinking of us as mice munching on grain from an overturned truck. Life is great (and the population explodes) until the grain is gone. Then woe to the mice.
Of course, people point to other great challenges we have overcome as a species. But is this time really different?
Blueprints for how to make a tractor won't help if the blueprints assume gas or diesel fuel, and there's no oil any more...
In fact, they already did it once. Coal-fired steam engines powered civilization once, and could easily do it again. Probably better, using modern techniques such as fluidized beds, pelletizing, etc.
There's this perception that oil will some day "run out" suddenly, like the last sip at the bottom of a milkshake.
It doesn't work that way. If it happens, oil will gradually become more expensive, until the point where it becomes more economic to use coal (or fission, or fusion, or whatever). At that point, the amount of oil remaining becomes moot.
It would be a lot more impressive if that list worked its way up from having nothing but hand-tools that use no energy to basic generating capacity, smaller power tools, larger power tools, actual machinery.
If you don't have a plan like that in place this will lead absolutely nowhere, try making a hydraulic piston without a really good lathe, a supply of oil, a good seal, a pump and so on. The list of pre-requisites for something as simple as a hydraulic piston is very long.
Metal fabrication is just like software building layer upon layer of capabilities.
The whole project should not be undertaken as "what would I design if I wanted to restart civilization tomorrow" but as "what would I design if I were to be transported to 1500 with nothing but this catalogue".
If anything the 'reboot' would simply re-use or salvage that what was left over from the aftermath of whatever did us in in the first place, it's a lot easier to fix an old jeep than to make a new one and it will still outperform a horse when doing tractor duty.
Until that happens there won't be any substantial pressure to get a LFTR program going, which will definitely solve the problem.
It sometimes really gets to me that we're all suffering a lot because a few politicians won't be adults and do their job and fix the energy situation. But there are a lot more campaign contributions from existing big business than theoretical new big businesses.
Your metaphor misleads you. It is inaccurate to characterize humanity as passively consuming a single pre-existing resource that it is utterly incapable of recreating. We are generating knowledge as well, and knowledge really is power, and from that we generate yet more resources of other types.
The question of whether we can outrun our own consumption is an interesting question that is not a guaranteed "yes", but the built-in hopelessness of your metaphor isn't part of the answer. It is inaccurate to the point of being anti-knowledge. The universe is awash in negentropy, and the true, physics-based boundaries of our growth are still inconceivably larger than we are right now.
Whenever I get too pessimistic, I think of the gobs and gobs of money to be made solving this issue (while still maintaining or improving our current standard of living). That said, I think many market optimists (not that I'm calling you one) don't really get EROEI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves...
Finally, if someone invents a 10x battery at an affordable price, the whole game changes.
If things really go to hell, I'm willing to bet that huge amounts of knowledge -- possibly even the vast majority of human knowledge -- will end up getting lost gradually, either as it becomes too expensive to keep the servers that store it running, or as the drives fail and it becomes an inefficient use of resources to replace them.
What's this?
Oil is just the VHS of energy - it came first and got market acceptance, but its not the best or even the only easily capitalized energy source.
If we lose just a bit of our knowledge, we'll be restricted to biomass.
Petroleum isn't just a fuel source, its a highly portable fuel source.
Clearly advanced battery tech will resolve most of that, but jets/rockets don't sound like they'll be using either batteries or nuclear as a fuel source anytime soon.
At some point the fungi evolved to eat the dead trees. So they can not become coal, oil or gas anymore.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_during_the_Copper_Ag...
[2] http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/mining....
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_extraction_techniques