EVE New Citizens Q&A

Heh, it most certainly is, for a newbie.

No, actually. Just salvaging is required. In a destroyer at first, then a noctis in time. Perhaps you can clean up others' wrecks, either with or without permission. It's also possible for you to offer money for the privilege of doing the salvage, in order to increase your volume, if you can figure out what the average salvage job is worth. That is, of course, homework. But it's something that can set you apart.
A secondary activity that dovetails well with salvaging is exploration. Do that while you don't have any salvage biz hits.

Nah... Newbies join every day, with the same rough profile. You're easy to kill, innocent and ignorant of the game mechanics, but broke, and not riding a shiney killmail. Technically you'll find people who prey on newbies, but for the most part everyone knows that A) it's not worth the time or effort spent to con/hunt/camp you, and B) pissing of newbies hinders growth of the game, which is not in their own interests.

Additionally, your tech1 industrial with no defensive measures is sufficient for a long, long time, and many situations. So you wont need to invest your time or ISK or your low-power slots into something beyond your cargo-expanded Bestower or Iteron, generally. Blockade runners are for specific circumstances; if you're not sure you need one, then you very likely don't.

Those two factors combined mean that your best defensive measure, your best move, is to keep doing what you're doing, but simply be wary, minimize your risks per undock, and plan to lose what you're about to undock. If you do these things, then there's never any need to stress, and a bad day wont ruin your month.

Another extra mile you can go, however, is to create bookmarks in frequently-travelled space.
Safe-spots, where you're not on-grid with any celestials.
Insta-dock bookmarks, where you're certain that the moment you exit warp, you'll be in range to dock.
And most importantly, instant-undock bookmarks, which are over 150km out in a straight line from the undock point, allowing you to warp out the very second you undock without requiring the time to align. Off-gate perches are also very valuable, something like 200 km above or below frequently used gates, so that you can scope them out before warping directly there.

These kind of bookmarks are commonly used in low-sec and null-sec, and are a necessity if you haul via gates out there.

If you tend to travel high-sec, then entirely avoid patches of low-sec between empires. Assume the gates are camped.

Finally, as for your aspirations, the most reasonable one that matches what you typed is to join a low-sec or null-sec alliance, and act as one of their logistitians and traders. Creating a market hub requires support from large military ventures - Market activity occurs BECAUSE of fights. It would take a truly rich and powerful individual to create a market from nothing; to create conflicts and losses themselves to fuel their randomly-placed market. Better to work the other way around - Look for an existing need for market work, and prop up the pre-existing PVP action & pilots.

In general though, this means you wouldn't be a friendly beacon in a sea of conflict. No sir, you will need a group of ambitious friends to throw in with, in order to ply your trade... and gain the resultant enemies that go along with it. In Eve, everything is, logically, potentially unfriendly to someone out there. Even a ""neutral"" market hub. That's with quotation marks, around the quotation marks.