Five jobs you could do on Elon Musk’s new Mars
5x5 Geek hero/Bond villain Elon Musk yesterday announced the most ambitious goal yet for his SpaceX programme, evolving it from a disruptive commercial space launch company to a corporation which will colonise the Solar System and turn humanity into a multi-planetary species.
Musk has targeted Mars for his efforts — he’s on record saying he wants to see out his life on the red planet — and his plan is to send a several spaceships at once, bigger than anything humans have ever built, to build a self-sustaining city. Each ship would carry from 100–200 people, plus the cargo they need, landing them on Mars and being refuelled to return and collect more colonists. Ultimately, a fleet of 1,000 craft would ply the route between Earth and Mars, making 10,000 trips to create civilization of a million people over 40-100 years (yeah, that’s a big margin of error).
Musk’s presentation teases a terraformed Mars and trips to Venus or the moons of Jupiter, and he says there would be no shortage of jobs for his colonists. But what might they be, and could you do them even if you don’t have the skills now?
1 Pizza chef One of the first places Elon Musk mentions for his Mars city is a pizza restaurant. He must like pizza a lot. Pizza Hut has already made pizzas for astronauts on the International Space Station, but if there’s one form of cooking that needs gravity it’s tossing pizza dough into pizzas, and on a low-gravity planet like Mars you might be able to make really big pizzas. The best pizzas are made in wood-fired ovens, and sourcing the fuel for those could be a challenge.
2 Geologist Pilots and rocket engineers need a lot of experience as well as training before you’ll put your faith in them, but with a good run-up and at least a three-month voyage to fill on the way, you could pack in a lot of time to study geology and learn the practical side when you land. Once on Mars there should be plenty of opportunities to hunt down rare minerals from the days when it was more geologically active, not to mention working out where to plant the nukes to melt all that ice into oceans of water.
3 Gardener The colonists will need to get a head-start on growing things to eat, whether it’s potatoes like The Martian or a more varied vegetable menu. Meat eaters might struggle, but you could take frozen fish eggs for a bit of aquaponics to supply protein. Perhaps small mammals like rabbits and hamsters could survive the journey, providing both tasty meat and manure to feed your vegetables. Anything but tofu.
4 Sanitation engineer One member of Musk’s audience commented that Mars could be a “dusty shitstorm” unless the colonists can deal with the problem of human waste. In truth, recyclers of human waste are could be high priests of the colony, squeezing every scrap of oxygen from the air, turning bodily waste into fertiliser or other chemicals, and making full use of former colonists, either by planting them in the farms or processing them for the eagerly anticipated Soylent Sundays.
5 Builder/miner So if Musk wants to make interplanetary travel affordable to the average person — his aim is the median cost of an American home for a flight to Mars-how will that work? Will you sell your home on Earth, if you have one, for a ticket to Mars? (Sorry kids, Mom’s going to Mars so you’re homeless) Will you indenture yourself to SpaceX for the chance to fly? (The Martian slave rebellion is inevitable) And who’s going to build those dream homes on the dusty red plains/in the dusty red caves? The ideal colonist will be either really good with concrete and domes or one of those London renovations specialists digging out underground extensions in Chelsea.
