A brilliant essay! Thank you for sharing your lucid and precise insights. You've made my day!

The most adaptive way I know of looking at our current predicament (global heating + all of its spinoffs and runaway feedback loops in the biosphere and noosphere alike) is to see it as a sort of "crisis of adolescence" as you suggest, rather than the starkly inevitable snuffing out of intelligent life in the universe.

We are, after all, a part of Gaia, not apart from it. And once we grasp the implications of this fact, and let go of magical thinking (both economic and religious), we can evolve toward a symbiotic, rather than parasitic, relationship with Gaia--that is, with our biological support systems. Evolutionary biologists have often observed, for example, that parasites tend to evolve, over time, toward symbiotic accommodations with their hosts; this might even be the way that eukaryotes evolved!

Potentially, we can do this ourselves, starting with the study and practice of Permaculture--a way of thinking and acting to create human habitations that are symbiotic with, rather than parasitic upon, their biological support systems. And this could be the next necessary step in our cultural evolution, at least among those resilient enough to survive the upcoming complexity catastrophe!