Ask a Mars Career Counselor

What would be the best job to have in a Mars colony?

Posted 01.05.2009 at 3:06 pm 2 Comments

Do I Have a Deal for You Strike it rich selling yet-to-be terraformed land. Michael Carroll

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.

Next, buddy up with the engineers working to terraform the Martian hillsides. It's their job to turn all that red dust into Earth-like soil that can support robust vegetation and seed the atmosphere to rain and form lakes and oceans. Figure out where future beachfront property will be, buy it, and auction off lots to the highest bidder.

Of course, this prosperous career path has its risks. You’ll be outdoors a lot, and Mars’s atmosphere is pretty thin, so cosmic radiation could fry your DNA. Things could fall on you on construction sites. And you’d probably go prospecting alone (why split the profits?), so no one could help you if you got lost or fell into a crater. You could play it safe in the colony, working at the Spacemart. But you’re on Mars—take a chance!

Robert Zubrin is president of the Mars Society and author of How to Live on Mars.

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2 Comments

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seatellite

01/14/09 at 3:20 pm

I would be more interested in an article that shows the possible future industry of Mars. Obviously mining would be the big starter, but what else could there be?

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DarkFx

01/16/09 at 2:39 am

Hydroponics (Farming) , Recycling (Water and Waste) , Robotics Production, Cybernetics and Engineering, Manufacturing, Refining, Distribution, and as mentioned above; Construction.

What I don't Get, Is How can you Sell land that Is Owned by the Human Race? Or Is it, Who ever gets there first claims the planet?

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