Could a period like the Middle Ages happen again, either in a

>>2544930
Inherent in any answer to that question should be the question of, "What actually happened to the Roman Empire?"
Cleanse your mind of any /pol/-tier fallacies and the urge of modernity to compare everything to itself in order to justify its own supreme greatness.

Did the world technologically collapse? No. Technology continued to develop after the Roman Empire.

Did the world economically collapse? Sort of, but not really. The Roman Empire would never see the same sort of economic power as it had in its first century (after the Republic), and the Middle Ages saw a reversal of economic trends as it went on, although the economic integration of Europe was more decentralized.

Did the Empire racially collapse? Essentially, yes. The Roman Republic and Empire had slowly pushed north, pressing peoples constantly at war with each other against their enemies. This caused push-back, which led to migrations that were happening even in Julius Caesar's day.
The push-back around the time traditionally associated with the collapse of the Empire was massive, though, and the barbarians got farther than ever before. How this is relevant is because you had peoples who's culture was not as refined as the Romans living in places previously occupied by the refined people. They would adopt their religion and some of their culture, but retaining key elements of their own. This is what changed the Empire into something that we don't call the Roman Empire, but it happened gradually.

Overall, I would say that the idea of the Dark Ages is a meme not founded in any hard fact. There was just the combination of a move toward a less centralized political and economic structure and the movement of people not associated with refined lifestyles into the areas previously associated with those lifestyles. Technology continued to progress. Learning continued to progress among those that learned. Higher degrees of urbanization saw higher degrees of disease, as they always do.

>>2544930
Fortunately the worlds knowledge can now be stored on more than a few sheets of papyrus so it will not be lost in some collapse

>>2544950
This true to a degree but it wrong to think that nothing was lost. The Roman Empire was able to build and maintain many construction projects not found again in Europe till modern times. Also the Roman economy made it to around the end of the 4th century. One more thing the economic collapse was catastrophic for the marginal areas of Rome such as northern France and England.

>>2544930
It happened several times before Rome already. Bronze Age Collapse comes to mind.

>>2544950
This is ignoring the massive destruction wrought by the tribes, it was apocalypse level population loss, the population of Amorica was said to have dropped so much it couldn't even maintain a monetary system and simply reverted to bartering with a survivalist twist