Listen, Clark isn't making any judgements about the goodness of any of these levels of achievement: he is simply contrasting the lifespan of the planet against humanity's exponential growth in capability. Regardless of other cultures thoughts on the basic wholesomeness of progress, it is fact that the technological progress that has been made has given us amazing powers in a short period of time, and I don't think that anyone envisions that this growth in capability will be trailing off anytime soon. So when Clark says "Apes or Angels" he isn't "placing aliens in the Great Chain of Being", he is simply stating that the TECHNOLOGICAL CAPABILITIES of aliens that are at all similar to us will either be very primitive (apelike) because they are in the pre-exponential-growth phase, or in the angel phase (far up the exponential growth curve).
The verbiage about balance or cycles or homeostatis doesn't represent humanity in any form that I understand. Yes, there are people that support the idea of statis, but that is such a tiny fraction of humanity that it's not worth worrying about right now: everybody else wants medicine and electricity and light and food and tentacle porn. The nature of most people is to strive for more and/or better, and I don't foresee that changing. Nor do I see us backsliding anytime soon -- I suppose some kind of frightful war could put a damper on things for awhile, but I'm reasonably hopeful that this won't happen. I've seen some articles that "starting over", if required, would now be impossible because the easily-accessible forms of resources are no longer available, e.g. if all the world's oil derricks were destroyed and 18th century man came along, there'd be no way to have an oil-based economy. Seems unlikely.
Anyway, your goofy philosophical ramblings seemed so off-point that I felt I had to respond. You must've had some really shitty experience with Christians, I guess.