[ctdonath]

"A living" is a rather broad concept. Two factors are grossly overlooked: the general standard of living is rising, and much of that rise results from making it nigh unto illegal to live below that standard. Even the "poor" expect easy indoor heat & AC, toilets flushed with city-supplied drinking water, one car per adult, a cell phone per teen & up, etc. I grew up on hand-split wood heat & no AC, well water, one car for the household, wired phones with 4-digit numbers, etc. - and we were firmly one-income "middle class". Nowadays wood stoves are regulated into near oblivion (near prohibitory particulate limits), heat & AC standards required for "certificate of occupancy" along with high plumbing standards, cars include a plethora of then-unattainable options and must meet very high gas mileage standards, cell phones are a standard welfare item, etc. - all due to well-meaning but subtly devastating requirements to live even in "functional poverty". Normalization of home mortgages, insurance-paid access to extremely high health care standards, and easy access to crushing loans for education, all seem perfectly justified now yet persuasively "force" people to work more and more "to make a living" which many of us saw as luxurious not all that long ago.

You can live well on a whole lot less - as most people did not all that long ago. Ditch the >1000 sq ft homes, instant shirt-sleeve indoor temperatures, waste-encouraging volumes of drinking water, high-MPG with-all-the-features cars, supercomputer-in-your-pocket phones, etc. Get a catastrophic health insurance plan. Pay your way thru college. Downgrade the phone. And elect leaders who seek to make simple living legal, and otherwise decrease burdensome tax rates.

Your "living" standard is your choice. Really. Contain your costs, and you can live on a whole lot less. As always I'll be derided for these observations, but it's what I grew up on.

[Trizek]

Sure you can definitely live with lower standard (nice story of yours by the way, remember us how recent progress revolutionized our lives). But I mean liberating as much as we can people from the necessity of working, and improving their quality of life in general, is a more realistic fight for humanity than destroying an asteroid.

[ctdonath]

Someone has to do the work; value is not durable nor zero-sum. Destroying an Earth-threatening asteroid is assuring the continued opportunity of all to produce as they can & will; confiscating the fruits of the productive to give to the idle punishes the former and rewards the latter. What you describe as "liberating" is mutual enslavement of producers & idle to each other. What you describe as "realistic" is unsustainable no less than the extinction event of an asteroid impact.

[Trizek]

"Destroying an Earth-threatening asteroid..." But what asteroid ? That's all the point, it's ridiculous to care as much about a non-existing asteroid in the near feature than the plenty of dramatic problems that are causing damages for centuries.

"Someone has to do the work", "confiscating the fruits of the productive to give to the idle punishes the former and rewards the latter". That's absolutely not what liberating work is about, and what you describe is a pretty narrow view of economics that we're taught since childhood. Investigating a bit economy shows it get way more complicated than that, just defining "productive value" is a very deep subject. I don't believe you and I are able to assess if an economic system is sustainable or not (reality shown even the best economists can't), whereas scientist are pretty accurate about the low probability of an asteroid destroying earth in 2016.