How Space Travel Will Change Professions When we start to explore other planets and moons it is going to change a lot of professions and the way these people operate. I can’t help but think archaeology will become even more exciting. Take the planet Mars for example. Some scientists think there might have been life on Mars in the past. There are objects on Mars which look like they were made by intelligent beings. Can you imagine being an archaeologist and digging up alien relics. I ask you, aside from meeting an actual intelligent extraterrestrial, what could be more exciting than that? Digging for proof of life on Mars will require the archaeologists to wear some sort of protective gear and oxygen. I guess if they found an area which might yield a lot of objects it might pay to build a temporary shelter over it so they could dig in relative comfort. I have always thought archaeology was interesting, but I never would have had the patience to spend hours, days, and months with a trowel in one hand and small brush in the other. The patience this requires is monumental. I believe this will lead to that profession getting a lot more people into the fold. Another profession which will change will be medicine. It will change for several reasons. We might gain medical knowledge if we meet advanced aliens and include it in our repertoire of medical treatments. If we meet with aliens who are not as advanced as us, we may learn from them about their physiology and develop new medicines for them. Medicine will definitely change as we learn more from even the animals and plants we will probably come across, especially if they have special healing abilities we can adapt. Engineers will see changes they have to make in construction as we build in places with different amounts of gravity, moisture and such. Some places we build in may have constant winds which would put pressure on our structures. Now with the addition of 3D printing hopefully they will be able to erect structures in record time. Over the years there may be some failures with buildings and other structures due to the fact an alien planet might have some sort of imbalance we didn’t know about which produces tremors and such and this will be inevitable. I say this because we know a lot about the earth and yet we still have structural failures here from time to time. Geology could also get a lot more interesting. It could completely change our value system on earth. In case you are wondering about what I am talking about, I am saying if we find out rare minerals are a lot more plentiful on some moon or exoplanet than here. Say for example we find out gold is quite common or diamonds, this could make their value drop and even maybe make them worthless. I remember a story like that. A man managed to amass billions in gold and was put into suspended animation. He figured his gold would be worth a lot more in the future. When he woke up and went outside, to his horror he noticed many objects were made out of gold because it had become worthless. The diamond market has been tittering on the verge for years now and diamonds have only kept their value because the main company digging diamonds has held many diamonds off the market. The aerospace field will change dramatically. This will happen especially fast if they find things of value which have to be transported back to earth. They will produce faster rockets or some other means of faster travel because time is money. They will also likely start building larger vessels, especially if they want to transport ore of some kind. By then the speeds of today’s rockets will look primitive indeed. It will be equivalent to how sailing ships kept improving, then we developed powered ships, which had motors. We later went to nuclear power in some ships. This revolution will take place in space, it is only a matter of time. As commercial companies get into passenger flights to other moons and planets this will also change things. We probably will also get much faster flights on earth. I say this because it may get much easier to reach orbit and from there it is only about one and one-half hour to any place on earth. These companies will be learning and as they get more proficient it will make things better for the passengers. They may start out a commercial route by flying them to a space station where they could change to a larger more comfortable and faster space vessel. Look how the planes airlines used progressed from what they used at the start of passenger service compared to what we have today. New professions will surely spring up. One might be a person who specializes in creating atmospheres for structures built on other planets. You will need people who can get the atmosphere inside a structure or dome to be as earthlike as possible. Another might be some sort of engineer who could repair a ship in flight if something goes wrong. On a long space flight, I would think this would be an essential member of the crew. One good thing is scientists are talking about using a 3D printer to create parts needed for these repairs instead of having to carry a whole inventory of parts which not only take up space, but burn more fuel. As we learn things from our flights into space, a whole new crop of instructors will be needed to teach us about space and the things we have found. I am sure there will be a lot of exciting discoveries in every field. Even now there is so much to teach it would take years to learn everything we know about space and why certain things happen. When I was in college, I remember some people wanting to take astronomy, but when they found out there was a lot of math involved, they changed their minds. Being an astronaut will also change. We have relatively few astronauts today and I am including the cosmonauts in my count. There have been about 600 people trained to be astronauts and I assume about the same number of cosmonauts. If we add the Chinese and the rest of the world, I bet it won’t come to more than about 2,200. This will change drastically. Remember when we first started to fly there were only a couple of people who could do it, today there are hundreds of thousands. Look for astronauts and cosmonauts corps to become much larger and something similar to the air force to be formed in all countries for them.
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