The People Who Get Sent

I’ve been thinking about who actually goes first—on frontiers.

Not the dreamers. Not the billionaires. Usually? Workers. Contracted. Sponsored. Sent.

And the more I looked into it, the more I kept finding the same pattern: most people don’t pay their way into new worlds. Someone pays to send them.

The pattern keeps showing up

The Virginia Company, 1607. Of 104 colonists at Jamestown, maybe three had money. The rest? Blacksmiths, carpenters, farmers on seven-year contracts. The company paid for everything—passage, tools, food—in exchange for labor that might turn a profit.

Hudson’s Bay Company moved 3,000 workers to frozen Canadian outposts over two centuries. All on corporate contracts. The British government shipped 162,000 convicts to Australia. Even during the California Gold Rush, most forty-niners traveled on borrowed money or mining company sponsorships.

I keep finding the same thing: the people who went were sent. By someone expecting returns.

Mars won’t be different

SpaceX talks about $500,000 tickets. Maybe $200,000 eventually. But that’s still a house. Most people won’t buy their way to Mars—they’ll be hired to go.

Picture it: multi-year contracts for engineers to maintain life support. Medical personnel learning to set bones in one-third gravity. Agricultural specialists coaxing potatoes from regolith. Solar panel technicians keeping the lights on.

Not tourists. Infrastructure.

The compensation packages write themselves—paid transport, habitat quarters, deferred Earth-side bonuses, maybe IP rights for innovations developed under pressure. Priority slots for family on later missions. It’s how the East India Company did it, just with better air recycling.

Something’s already shifting

Look at what’s happening in education. Closed-loop agriculture programs are filling up. Materials science enrollment is surging. Systems thinking courses everywhere.

The Homestead Act of 1862 saw thousands skip formal education to claim 160 acres. They learned blacksmithing and well-digging because those skills meant survival. Today’s version might be:

• Hydroponics and vertical farming
• Remote medicine and diagnostics
• Solar systems and battery management
• Water recycling tech
• AI troubleshooting

These aren’t just Mars skills. They’re drought skills. Blackout skills. Supply chain breakdown skills.

The real payload

Mars has no gold to ship back. No spices. But the Dutch East India Company didn’t just trade—they invented modern accounting and joint-stock ownership. Telegraph companies laying Atlantic cables created tech that became the internet’s backbone.

Mars forces innovation under absolute constraints. Every breakthrough in water recycling helps Phoenix. Every advance in small-space food production helps Singapore. Every psychological tool for isolation helps remote workers everywhere.

The companies paying to send people aren’t just building rockets. They’re building the operating system for resource-constrained living.

Try this

Pick one thing that would matter both on Mars and in next Tuesday’s power outage.

Maybe it’s learning to grow lettuce in a closet. Maybe it’s basic Arduino programming. Solar panel basics. Ham radio. Just pick one and spend a month with it.

Not because you’re going to Mars. Because the skills that matter there are starting to matter here.

The signal I’m seeing

When the Mayflower sailed, most passengers didn’t know they were reshaping global power. When railroad companies recruited in the 1860s, workers didn’t realize they were building a new economy’s skeleton.

Mars isn’t really about Mars. It’s about what we’re becoming as we reach for it.

The infrastructure is already changing. The skills are already shifting. The question isn’t whether you’ll go—it’s whether you’re developing the capabilities that matter as this unfolds.