The whole notion of a civilization wiping itself out seems wrong to me.
If it took, say, three billion years for the “primordial soup” to creat the essential building blocks of life, another billion years for single cell life to emerge, and another billion years for animal and plants to emerge then finally a few hundred million years for intelligent beings to come to life, then how would you wipe out ALL life?
I don’t think you would. If all higher life forms were wiped out, wouldn’t it be likely that single or simple multiple cell would be hiding out in extreme places on a planet? If this residue or remnants of higher life were left behind, then the life-forming processes would be shorted by several billion years and advanced intelligent life could emerge again in less than a billion years.
So, yes, intelligent civilizations could wipe themselves out, but they would re-emerge over and over again.
Unless they killed themselves with climate change. Everybody knows that that is irreversible and a planet simply could not heal itself after all life was wiped out. (/s)
One of the pathetic aspects to this rubbish is that most likely these “researchers” were paid by the taxpayers through a grant to come up with this rubbish.