When we were kids, our basic dream jobs were pretty straightforward: firefighter, soccer player, nurse, astronaut… However, the world has changed, and here’s a list of five new jobs our kids will love hearing about.
Paleo Artist
Agreed, this was a job available back in the day, but new 3D printing technologies and computer rendering have allowed the painters of dinosaurs to go even further. We can print the bones and structure of any ancient creature we discover, and speculate creatively about evolution in the name of science.
Simon Hastelag is a great example of what being a paleo artist means today. A Swedish artist based in Stockholm, his work has attracted the attention of Scientific American and can be found on his website as well.
Museum’s Chief Curiosity Correspondent
I bet you didn’t know that’s the
official position Emily Graisle holds at the Field Museum in Chicago, but it is.
As this extensive interview will tell you, Emily was studying art when she stumbled upon her first Natural History Museum in Montana. Amazed by what she saw there, she decided to film a small video about one of the archived features. The rest is Brain Scoop history.
Game Designer
One of the big things of the moment, online gaming has reached every laptop, tablet, an
d phone, and is played by millions of humans around the world. The fact that the narrative, look, and layout of every game you’ve stumbled across has been created by a real person is amazing.
Rob Pardo, creator of World of Warcraft, is our main example here.
Caretaker of the Islands
in 2009, Ben Southall became known as the holder of the “Best Job in the World.” 
Sponsored by Queensland Tourism, he moved from England to New Zealand for six months to “take care” of Hamilton Island–enjoying the Great Barrier Reef, scuba diving, navigating, doing outdoors in a big way, and talking about it online. He is now an Ambassador of Queensland Tourism, and an adventure advocate in Australia. Some of his feats include a 1600 km kayak along the Great Barrier Reef in 2011 and a world climb record for the tallest mountain reached in each Australian state in the shortest time in 2013. His website follows his adventures around the planet.
Kickstarterer
I know that’s not a real job, but it encompasses something pretty great: the ability to present a project to the world and be able to fund it by bypassing more traditional barriers 
like banks and financiers. Some great examples of this newfound ability are: musician Amanda Palmer, whose album Theatre is Evil debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard 200; designer Scott Wilson, who won a National Design Award from Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum after the success of his TikTok + LunaTik project; and the people behind GoldieBlox, now distributed nationwide.
I’m sure there’s plenty more, and that you can add them to the list (please do!); however, these are tangible proof that the world has changed in many ways, and, in the majority, to the better. If someone would ask me what time period I would like to have lived in, I would answer the same thing Douglas Adams did: my own, because all the good stuff is happening right now.
Featured image by Simon Stalenhag
How about being NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-nasa-s-one-and-only-planetary-protection-officer/