If we hadn’t had fossil fuels, including Uranium and Plutonium, we wouldn’t be able to wipe ourselves out quickly and likely a few would always survive all self made catastrophies.
There may be species out there who don’t have this stuff on their planets. Maybe we’ll meet them one day.
It’s not an unpopular scenario - it’s just completely improbable.
The more likely scenario being that we wipe ourselves out long before evolving to learn to work things out.
There is a theory that the reason we haven’t found other intelligent life in the universe is that it inevitably destroys itself.
If we hadn’t had fossil fuels, including Uranium and Plutonium, we wouldn’t be able to wipe ourselves out quickly and likely a few would always survive all self made catastrophies.
There may be species out there who don’t have this stuff on their planets. Maybe we’ll meet them one day.
The most probable of the great filters IMO.