Can anyone recommend some resources, or provide actual examples, of any relevant evolutionary-biology-style equations which could describe what factors would most likely predominate to allow for the survival of sapience, given such factors as the ease which any given individual can acquire the means of killing large numbers of people, the scale of those means, the willingness o people to use those means, the ability of small groups to travel away from other groups, and so on?
Or, put another way - is there any way I can quantitatively check my intuition that a valuable way to avoid certain existential risks is to flee Earth?
While Earth would be easier to terraform due to available resources and global conditions already closer to something inhabitable, it would not be safer, as mistakes in the terraforming process are not going to be as catastrophic when you try to terraform a backup, uninhabited planet.
Toying with complex, poorly understood processes at a time when we wouldn't even have our current resources, manpower on a ravaged Earth whose environment might just be one wrong step from becoming much worse, could destroy a majority of what remains of humanity, the economy and valuable resources, making it impossible for us to ever recover.
(I am however assuming we were talking about global terraforming of the whole planet, not making minute changes to local spots)