Even if the price went back to $0.01, I think BTC would still survive. Everyone would be picking up coins left right and center at that price
I would disagree. If we managed to get that low people would have considered the whole thing as a big failure and left it alone. If it was so clear that Bitcoin was great the price would have shot up significantly long before late '11.
Well, the important thing to remember is that Bitcoin has utility. Even when it was worth almost nothing, people were still using it. Even if it goes back down to $0.00001, there will be people who use it for different things. So in terms of being alive/dead, Bitcoin won't be going anywhere, regardless of the price.
Back then, it was just a fun thing that people were experimenting with. As a guy from that time (back when Gavin was giving out
BTC0.05 every hour on his faucet) I can easily tell you that very few people believed we would reach what we have now. Aside from the tiny community, no one else actually accepted it as a form of payment. We didn't have the 'infrastructure' like BitPay to get merchant acceptance nor did we have a particularly large voice in the real world. It took time to develop and grow and if it suddenly destabilized to that extent the perception quite possibly would be that it is dead and everyone would jump ship. You must remember that anything Bitcoin does can and is replicated in another altcoin. Fundamentally, nothing but the 'infrastructure' we have now for Bitcoin makes it different from any other alt.