> faster than it is figuring out that we need to self-impose limits on our growth in order to avoid a catastrophic failure of our ecosystem

We "figured out" unconstrained growth could be catastrophic a couple of hundred years ago at the very least. And in fact we guessed prematurely as technology extended the date of the catastrophe multiple times.

So we then bounced into a phase of overconfidence whereby some of us decided that technology could overcome all problems.

(Arguably we are still in this phase - or at least some of us hope this turns out to be true as we've lost hope in the possibility of political solutions to problems caused by growth)

Yes, I think you have this exactly right. We've dodged the bullet for a few hundred years, which our brains are predisposed to think of as a long time. Then we (well, not all of us, but enough of us to matter) (mis-)apply inductive reasoning and conclude that because doomsday predictions have always been wrong in the past they will continue to be wrong in the future.

In fact, you can sum up the problem as a pithy slogan: Doomsday predictions are always wrong. Until they aren't.

Someone should make T-shirts.

Given enough civilisations, it's likely that a few will eventually manage to not wipe themselves out (at least for long enough to become fairly redundant).

Yes. The $64k question is: how many is enough, and do we actually have that many close enough in space and time that it matters?

Exactly, and how many want to be found, or find other species? Of those, how many are so far away that communication is a pointless enterprise? Not to mention that the more difficult and costly communication becomes with distance, the further out in time you are. All in all, using a ton of high tech and energy to say “hi” to us from 10,000 ly away and 10,000 years of time seems... weird. At 100,000ly it starts to be a really exotic proposition, and at a million ly you shouldn’t assume your message will even reach the same species.

Unless your fellow technological life is within a few hundred light years, communication of any kind starts to look like throwing messages in bottles. Of course the closer your target is, the less wistfully academic it is. If Proxima Centauri had a planet with a civilization like ours, you’d have to consider what they could do other than just talk. At that point, the issue switches from insane time scales rendering the whole process moot, to potential forms of dark forest detente.