brother we could easily eliminate 99% of life on the planet tomorrow or drastically alter the composition of the atmosphere if we wanted to.

That remaining 1% are then actually the most advanced species, since they can continue their billion year existence through a blip of a couple thousand years when the environment became a bit more radioactive. We're so fragile that we're effectively biologically unstable, they're so advanced that they don't even need to know what happened.

It's not our capacity that matters but our actual behavior. Sure, we could cause even greater mass extinction. But will we choose preservation over suicide? That matters in evaluating our role in the hierarchy of life