From space junk and the International Space Station to Elon Musk and SpaceX, space is becoming a more human place. What will it mean for us to live among the stars? SAPIENS host Jen Shannon probes the nascent field of space archaeology and looks to the mystery of exoplanets for answers.  

• Alice Gorman is a senior lecturer in the college of humanities at Flinders University, and Justin Walsh is associate professor and chair of the Art Department at Chapman University. Together, they lead the International Space Station Archaeology Project.
• Lisa Messeri is assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University and the author of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds. She is currently investigating place-making in the field of virtual reality technology.

Learn more about space at sapiens.org:

• Unmanning Space Language
• Anthropologists in Outer Space
• Interplanetary Environmentalism

This episode of SAPIENS was produced by Paul Karolyi, edited by Matthew Simonson, and hosted by Jen Shannon, with support from Sapiens co-hosts Esteban Gomez and Chip Colwell.

SAPIENS producer Arielle Milkman, executive producer Cat Jaffee, and House of Pod intern Lucy Soucek provided additional support.

Fact-checking is by Christine Weeber, illustration is by David Williams, and all music is composed and produced by Matthew Simonson.

SAPIENS is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library.

This is an editorially independent podcast funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and produced by House of Pod.