Good post. Increasing investment in the status quo is a nice way to look at this.
A long time ago someone made the point, which stuck in my mind, that all of this is an argument in favor of death. If people didn't die, stuff wouldn't change.
I think the habit-forming nature of human consciousness goes far deeper than we've yet admitted. That might also explain why people change less as they age - they've been around longer so habits have had longer to form. Gene Clark had a great line, "The longer you're in one place, the harder it gets to leave."
There's also a famous line from Max Born (or was it Planck) who said: New ideas are accepted in science not because anyone changes his mind, but because old scientists die. (I'm paraphrasing.)
If people knew they would live for millions of years, I'm confident some of them would get around to changing their policies a bit to allow for some gradual changes.
I think you're underestimating the force of habit.
Also, when you do the same thing for a long time, time itself changes. A million years relative to our psychology would not be anything like a million years relative to million-year-beings'.
We only need 0.01% of the population to make changes, and not very fast, and they will eventually transform the world to the point it's hard for others to ignore.
A long time ago someone made the point, which stuck in my mind, that all of this is an argument in favor of death. If people didn't die, stuff wouldn't change.
I think the habit-forming nature of human consciousness goes far deeper than we've yet admitted. That might also explain why people change less as they age - they've been around longer so habits have had longer to form. Gene Clark had a great line, "The longer you're in one place, the harder it gets to leave."