No they couldn't. We only have one habitable planet. Terraforming Venus and Mars would be much less efficient and even if you did terraform them you can only have so many lives on a terrestrial planet before it becomes impossible to remove waste heat. Thermodynamically Earth can probably only support in the low trillions and that's covering it in layers of mega city across its entire surface. You could spend a thousand years terraforming Venus to support a few billions in relative comfort or trillions in misery or ignore Venus and support quadrillions in the asteroid belt.
I thought we were talking about leaving earth empty to live in space? Yes once you hit an upper bound living on earth becomes little less costly than living in space, but for those first few trillion it would be much less resource intensive to live planetside than to fuck off into space for no reason.
No they couldn't. We only have one habitable planet. Terraforming Venus and Mars would be much less efficient and even if you did terraform them you can only have so many lives on a terrestrial planet before it becomes impossible to remove waste heat. Thermodynamically Earth can probably only support in the low trillions and that's covering it in layers of mega city across its entire surface. You could spend a thousand years terraforming Venus to support a few billions in relative comfort or trillions in misery or ignore Venus and support quadrillions in the asteroid belt.
I thought we were talking about leaving earth empty to live in space? Yes once you hit an upper bound living on earth becomes little less costly than living in space, but for those first few trillion it would be much less resource intensive to live planetside than to fuck off into space for no reason.