“It is possible that the greatest contribution that anthropology can make will be to keep men's imaginations open, as they tend to let the predictable hardware coerce the form of the software.” Margaret Mead, The Contribution of Anthropology to the Science of the Future, Cultures of the Future1, 1978

The contents of this post are now available at Innovaspace’s blog: https://www.innovaspace.org/blog/space-medical-anthropologist. My gratitude to Prof. Thais Russomano and the rest of the team for the opportunity to work together, and share the piece on her think tank’s website.

Note on the artwork: all illustrations belong to the 1977 NASA’s report “Space Settlements: A Design Study” by Richard D. Johnson and Charles Holbrow, except for the cyborg-woman illustration by Edmund Alexander Emshwiller, cover-art of the Septermber 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine published by the long defunct French-Italian company World Editions.