[Banthum]

It's hard to reason intuitively about long time scales, because nothing is fixed any more. Usually we imagine technology, demographics, culture, etc to be fixed with respect to our decision-making, because most of our decisions are very short-term (and because people are quite lazy thinkers and prefer to face problems with fewer variables). But longer-term decisions, everything is in flux.

It reminds me of that concept where if you want to travel to another star, the best time to leave is not 'as soon as possible'. It may actually be better to wait several decades or centuries to develop new propulsion technologies (possibly based on entirely new branches of science), launch later, and arrive earlier.

Blast, I can't remember what that's called.

[golemotron]

It's related to the 'Adams Law of Slow Moving Disasters', but I agree that there is a more general concept to be named.