What skills would be most beneficial to a interstellar colonization effort?

Question

In the year 2018, in an alternate reality were technology is more advanced than our own, a spaceship is about to take or to the Trappist 1 solar system to set up a colony. During their very long trip, the crew of 25,000 people will all be placed in cryogenic preservation until they reach the destination. There they will set up the colony. My question is what skills would be most valuable in building the colony?

• The planet they land on is very similar to Earth with the same atmosphere, gravity, and a bearable temperature of about 77 degrees Fahrenheit ( or 25 degrees Celsius) and its gravity is about half of that on Earth.
• The entire crew was carefully selected by the agency that did the mission beforehand.
• The crew has enough rations to last them for a few years, and they were given seeds to grow food like tomatoes, potatoes, lentils, etc.
• They also have large solar panel arrays to provide power to the colony and vehicles to carry them to different locations they need to go to.
• Also once they land on the planet there is no turning back, so they will be staying there permanently.
• They have lots of advanced technology like sufficiently intelligent AI and 3D printers.

So what skills would be most needed to help build up the colony and manage it afterwards?

The answers here are for the skills needed to support a large colony with many people, not 80 to 300 like in the other one. This is not a duplicate, I am asking a similar but not the same question. Also, this colony still has contact with earth and they planet they land on isn’t an unknown planet and the colonist still have their advanced tech and cannot lapse into a pre industrial society

Answer 1

Farming and food production

Ironically, Hutterites or hard core Mennonites might be in demand.

Like the other German Anabaptist colony groups (Amish), they have a religious prohibition against excessive expenditures for personal comforts and personal possessions, and are already accustomed to the relatively primitive conditions that will exist in any colony. They are already skilled at living in small communities, and have the social structures in place to manage colonies. Their style of communal child rearing lends itself to colonization because the death or disability of a biological parent will have little more impact than they would with any other adult in the community.

Unlike other German Anabaptist colony groups, they have no qualms against using the latest technology in farming. Hutterite colonies actually derive income from patents for innovations in farming equipment.

Other infrastructure

As attractive as Hutterites etc are for food production, they could survive but not thrive in isolation. Hutterites depend on trade goods to meet even their frugal lifestyles. You would need engineers and tradesmen to establish an industrial base, a limited number of pure researchers (geologists, biologists) to study the new world and find resources, school teachers (a colony without children won't last long), entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, and the occasional 'Mad Amos".

In short, you will need a mix of people such as you might find in any rural town of the same size from USA of the mid 1800's

Answer 2

There are far too many skills that are all equally important in surviving. Farming, Construction, Plumbing, Water stuff, Doctors, Engineers, Electricians and so on. Certain mechanical skills become more important if you have a high level of automation, but in the end you would still need all skills. E.g. You have robots that can be controlled, but eventually you would run out of materials and then you would need mining and metal processing and so on to be able to build replacement parts to keep the robots that replaced farmers and constructions workers and so on. Its just a relentless cycle.

So here it goes... EARTH BENDING would be the most important skill you would have. Being able to physically manipulate the group would allow you to create all the infrastructure you would need for basic survival. Build your houses, use that all important metal bending to place the wires and move your electronics. You could easily construct sewage drains and mine metals just by digging it out. Even better, once you get some Lava benders you can melt all that metal and cast it pretty easily by creating casts using earth. For electrical needs, you could find some magnetic rare earth metals, and get some metal benders to start spinning it and create your own generator.

At the end of the day, if you want a medieval colony, that wouldn't be too hard, but if you want to incorporate electronics and advance tech, you will need to cover everything as there will be a high degree of co-reliance between your people and the technology they use.

Answer 3

Geneticists.

No alien world is going to 100% compatible with Earth lifeforms unless it was terraformed and stocked with plants and animals from Earth before the colonists even arrive.

They will need to be able to build custom lifeforms to terraform the planet or even just to survive on the planet.

With half gravity, chances are they will need to modify their own bodies to cope with the loss of bone density and other health problems.

Nanobot programmers.

Nanobots can be dropped on the planet preprogrammed to extract materials and build entire cities, clear farmland, build machinery and defend the colony from possible alien lifeforms.

No vital skills needed.

In reality if AI is sufficiently advanced, no skill is vital because the AI will be able to do anything a human could better than a human could.

With AI, the frozen humans would be little more than tourists along for the ride. The AI would do all the work and care for it's human masters. Any human skills would be solely for the amusement of the humans such as artists, chefs, poets, writers and musicians. Any vital jobs would be done by the AI.