Plumber Pirates in Space

What?

I’ll get to that a little later.

First, who is going to be the ones responsible for waist disposal on another colonized planet? Not exactly a dream job for an astronaut. I do understand that for a small group of colonists of about 20 or so, everyone would have to have the same skill set incase one or more of them, bit the big one. Assuming shift change rotations would be a common thing. Food regulation one week, power maintenance the next, so on, and so forth. I can assume the waist disposal and recycling would be one of the dreaded shifts. Only because of the smell and, you know, poop and pee.

How many crew members would shirk their duties after about a year? Would there be a secret lottery that doled out the prime jobs and crap jobs to crew members that performed perfectly and to those that didn’t? In 10 years would there finally be a few sad slacker astronauts that got permanently stuck in the worst jobs on the planet? You know, the jobs that nobody wanted to do. Whatever they would be. I will just point out that sanitation (in all its forms) is a very important and coveted job for some people. I am not trying to put it in a negative light. Some people find it to be a normal and noble profession. And I tip my hat to those people. I love my toilet, and how it magically makes the smelly stuff disapear.

Anyway. All that being said, would a thriving colony on another planet eventually get reinforcements from earth? Shuttles of experts in an assortment of professions? What would the “astronaut criteria” be by then? Would they be highly trained scientists? Or just civilians that had to pass the “space program”? Not to mention the psychological testing. How lax would the governments of earth be on these criteria over the span of a decade or more? My specific quandary of this question stemming from someone not being able to mentally handle the traumas of space travel and loosing their s#!+. Whether in space or on a distant planet. Or you know, an evil SOB that only wants to watch everything burn. Or a greedy sociopath that wants to rule another world because this one is too busy. The list goes on…

So, now we come down to the bones a gristle of the whole system of colonization. What are the general base necessities of human inevitability? Breathable air, edible food, drinkable water, sleep, death, and bathroom visits. The things that every human has in their lifespan. Well, every human that is not deprived of such things. Death being the one that comes when either old age comes knocking, or one of the other things is taken away (baring the occurrence of an accidental rock on the head, freezing to death, or getting eaten by an alien life form. Etc…). We would need a lot of these things right? Death being the exception. That’s just a bummer. So…

What would be the most sought after profession on the planet that everyone would never second guess. The one that would hold absolute power over everyone? No, not a rampaging murder-circus psychopath. It would be resource gathering, right? Well, I think it would be that. (Hoping that the resources of air, water, and food are not scarce. It would be pretty stupid to colonize a planet that didn’t have the abundant resources of these things that humans need to survive.) The people in charge of finding and getting crap, would refine it, and then distribute it, so it could be made into other crap. At least this would be the case during the early stages of colonization. Here on earth, there are 6 raw minerals that make up and sustain our modern societies. Salt, oil, iron, sand, lithium, and copper. Granted, having these on a colonized planet or materials like them would make it easy to adapt and continue to do what we have been doing for centuries. Consume, multiply, repeat.

How long would it take for a colonist with nothing to loose, break the rules, and start hoarding resources? And how could they possibly get away with it since the resources on a new planet are, for the most part, only accessible with limited machinery and manned/secured by a tight crew of people?

Plumbers. Whether you know it or not. Poop and pee are considered a fairly large resource on this planet. Yes, plumbers use pipes and channels for other things besides what comes out of our bodies. And yes, scientists are currently and successfully experimenting on recycling our human waist into food and water as I write this post out. And, unlike most of the resources the colonists didn’t bring with them to the new planet, it is the one “growing” resource available on demand without having to go out into the new world to try and find it.

Let me just pump the science fiction deification breaks on this freight train of thought for a second. One has to assume that our technology needs to be far enough advanced that we wouldn’t have to rely on building a vast network of processing plants for human waist that ultimately ends up in a landfill or a giant water supply. The goal being, is to use 100% of every drop of human waist in some form of usable recycled resource. The process would have to be easy to build and easy to maintain without consuming more resources than the output could produce.

So, if you had the ingenuity and the knowledge to wean off some of that resource, bit by bit, and not get caught doing it. Being a plumber is the way to go. Who lays pipe and/or channels for distribution? Plumbers. Given time and sneakiness. They could slowly feed this kind of resource away from the colony at some private, out of the way location. Which by the way, would make them a plumber pirate.

This of course all stems from the assumption that in a span of 20 or more years, a form of currency would be established. Trade, barter, value, demand, etc. Not much point in being a space pirate that steals diarrhea if you can’t make a profit off it.

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I have no idea why I wrote this.