It's a bit of a reductionist and humorous argument here but they weighed "Stopping the Industrial Revolution" against "Certain Death", and decided that maybe the people of the future would be wiser than they were and invent a solution to the problem, similar to how they invented the steam engine to solve the issue of manual and animal labor.
Obviously that didn't really work out, because the people of the future did in fact, invent a solution, but it was completely ignored in lieu of profit-seeking.
Somehow the problem invented was technological, spanned into the natural, but the solution pending was sociopolitical.
Homo sapiens is a rare breed.