Robert Zubrin

You’ve just landed on the Red Planet and are looking for a fresh start. Sure, that job selling respirators at the local space-hardware store sounds cozy, but it’s a dead-end career. Mars will be ripe with opportunity; you just have to figure out how to tap it. So here’s the secret: Go into construction. You’ll learn useful skills and be out on the surface, where the real action is. Explore the landscape on coffee breaks. All you need to do is stumble upon a nice deposit of precious material—like platinum or deuterium, a hydrogen isotope that could fuel fusion reactors—and you’ll have it made.

Click here for an illustrated guide to Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin´s six-step plan for inhabiting Mars, and for details on entering our contest to design the new flag of a freshly terraformed Red Planet-you could win a free subscription!

Martian Chess is played on an ordinary chessboard using a standard set of chess pieces, a standard deck of 52 playing cards, and a six-sided die. The pieces are set up in the usual fashion, and each player is dealt 13 cards. White goes first.