With the correct technology, that's not true: it's perfectly possible to build very nice habitats in space with O'Neill cylinders, but you need a lot of technology and space-based infrastructure to make that happen. A truly intelligent species would be working hard on that problem, because the technologies needed to make big O'Neill cylinders would also have many, many other uses. A stupid species, on the other hand, would dedicate its most intelligent members to figuring out how to advertise to each other more effectively and sell each other useless crap.
It's also quite possible to do multiple things at once when you have a civilization with many members. So as I said before, a truly intelligent species would not put all its eggs in one basket. They'd work on figuring out how to colonize space at the same time as figuring out how to deflect asteroids and also handle asteroid impacts if they did happen.
It's also quite possible to do multiple things at once when you have a civilization with many members. So as I said before, a truly intelligent species would not put all its eggs in one basket. They'd work on figuring out how to colonize space at the same time as figuring out how to deflect asteroids and also handle asteroid impacts if they did happen.