Paper short abstract:

The upcoming human settlements outside our planet require a great deal of technological deployment and the collaboration between humans and different types of robots. In this paper I propose an understanding between the different agents and the role of anthropology in their study of space lives.

Paper long abstract:

The missions that will inaugurate a new era of human planetary exploration are planned for the first half of this decade. The first settlements will require a large deployment of robots capable of performing exploration and analysis of the environment, as well as various robot-human collaborative tasks. It is expected that there will be more robots than humans, meaning that much of the human interactions will be with robots. In this sense, where do we draw the line of what is defined as "human" and what is defined as "robot"?

This line can be studied through the relationships between agents, human and non-human, their narratives and their experiences. Thus, it is found that the boundary between the human and the machine is neither objective nor arbitrarily drawn, but is constantly redefined and reformulated, as a sign of the overlapping of human and robotic identities. In Space Anthropology the debate is of particular interest, as future ethnographies will take into account technology, online life and robotics.

This paper aims to understand the blurring of the boundaries between humans and machines and the role that anthropology will have to play in the study of future extraterrestrial populations.