> somebody notices, we start pulling back
> on our rampant destruction enough to keep
> things operating
We did? That's great news. It must be recent though, so far i've only heard a lot of talk and a few useless feel good activities for guilty first worlders to distract themselves with like recycling their pop cans.
As far as self correction goes, the only thing any species has proved to be good at long term is going extinct.
That covers the types of pollution and over-consumption that are a visible and immediate threat, like dumping toxic waste in rivers and highly toxic air pollution.
There has been no serious willingness to address the issues of the increase in per-captia consumption of finite resources.
I was really taking issue with the statement that humans will be the first species that does not reproduce and consume as much as it possibly can before partial or complete extinction. That somehow humans will naturally reign in their natural impulses before it becomes too dangerous. That statement is based on zero evidence. We think we are the exception, humans are good at that, individually and collectively. Here's hoping.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stink
(Check out the cartoon of Faraday!)
The technology-enslavement theory is bunk because humans pretty much tend to self-correct over time. We start destroying the environment, somebody notices, we start pulling back on our rampant destruction enough to keep things operating. An epidemic of fat kids goes on, people start complaining, and schools begin the process of sort-of making their lunches healthier. If it got so bad that we almost destroy ourselves from too much internet use somebody would start complaining and we'd reign back on that too.
Probably the real reason we haven't met any is that they probably have agreements that they don't come down and show themselves to new planets until the new planet's peoples advance their space technology to an appropriate level; ours is still kind of dark-ages technology. Maybe after the military invests we can have a nice big boom in space travel.