To this day, the only completely closed life support loop is Earth itself.
Shadows over Sol, probabilities of success
The book provides an alternate method of rolling dice instead of drawing cards. It also claims that the dice method will provide the same results with about a 5% margin of deviation. Since a dice method is a lot more comfortable when calculating probabilities of success, I put the dice method into a spreadsheet and crunched some numbers, which should help with understanding/building characters.
Assuming you are facing the default TN of 10 (Average Difficulty according to the book, which also is a very common "to hit" number in the beastiary):
+1 Bonus: 24% chance of success
+2 Bonus: 33% chance of success
+3 Bonus: 43% chance of success
+4 Bonus: 54% chance of success
+5 Bonus: 62% chance of success
+6 Bonus: 71% chance of success
The bonus is calculated from the Skill and half of the associated Attribute (rounded down).
So for a starting character it seems like going for well rounded Attributes is the way to go to not suck at the secondary scores, but a +2 Attribute bonus and no skill gives you only a 1 in 3 chance of success. Not really worth trying, unless you're really desperate. With a +2 Attribute bonus your core competency Skills (3 Skills, each at +3) will give you a 62% chance of success, which seems low for a "Professional" (book description for a +3 Skill). Your "secondary" skills (3 Skills, each at +2) will net you a 54% of chance of success, so only slightly better than 50-50. I'm pretty sure a "Skilled Amateur" should do better than that, especially in an unforgiving environment like space. Finally, the lowest skills (3 Skills, each at +1) sit at a 43% chance of success. Barely worth trying.
It gets better with your chosen Attributes of focus, which usually will be at a +3 bonus, with your main Attribute possibly at a +4. That will help, but for the most part the few skills you have points in will be mostly useless.
Each increase in difficulty (10 to 12 to 14 to 16 and so on) will reduce your chances of success by around 22% to 25% (so, for example, a Professional (+3 Skill) with a human average linked Attribute (+2) only has a 40% success chance with a Difficult Task)
For my fellow Savages: that means you need an above human average Attribute of +3 and a Professional level Skill of +3 to have the same success chances as being a Wildcard with a d6 Trait.