Will humanity become civilized enough soon enough to survive the dangers of rapidly advancing technology?

I was recently watching an interview with Nick Bostrom, a philosopher, who was asked why we don’t see any evidence of intelligent life when we look out into the universe. And, basically, he said that if we did, it would be very bad news for us because there are obviously evolutionary “filters” that prevent life from forming advanced civilizations and spilling out across the galaxy. The first filter is the “spark” which gives rise to self-organizing life and evolution in the first place; and the second—and here is where my own reasoning takes over—occurs after sentient life appears and has to solve the problem of creating a planetary civilization that does not destroy itself through war or an inability to deal with threats to the planetary ecology.

Essentially, this second filter is a race between the ever-increasing destructive potential of human technology—which empowers people to an extent that fewer and fewer people can bring down or annihilate the whole civilization—and our ability to come to a kind of spiritual consensus which allows us to find meaning and purpose in life without lapsing into a self-serving moralism singles out some subset of humanity to scapegoat and throw overboard.

Ideology and culture wars have undermined human solidarity to a point we can hardly have a civil conversation about the systemic problems we face:

1) global warming;
2) unregulated genetic engineering;
3) dependence on fossil fuels;
4) the decline of the seas;
5) the corruption, cronyism, collusion and instability endemic in unregulated capitalism;
6) the rise of corporate power, the flood of corporate money in politics, the disenfranchisement of ordinary citizens, and the mistrust of government;
7) predatory lending and the growing gap between rich and poor;
8) the placing of political partisanship above the common good;
9) the stagnation and corruption of democratic institutions;
10) the adulteration of the food supply, obesity, drug-resistant microbes, for profit medicine, and declining health outcomes;
11) the runaway growth of the prison-military-surveillance-industrial complex;
12) the hollowing out of American industry, education, and science and concomitant decline of American power and prestige;
13) the rise of fundamentalism and apocalyptic religious movements and its intrusion into politics;
14) the exclusion of groups from full participation in national life due to racism, sexism, nativism and the inequities of class;
15) the flight from reality into fantasy, the loss of critical thinking, media market segmentation, the dumbing-down American discourse, the decline of fact-based journalism and the replacement of news with sensationalism and propaganda;
16) the rise of selfishness, cynicism, incivility, and the decline of altruism; and
17) blaming people for being stupid, irresponsible, and having brought these problems on themselves.