Cameron Smith, Phd.

Dr. Smith is a cofounder of Pacific Spaceflight, a private think tank developing pressurized garments for human space exploration. An archaeologist at Portland State University’s Department of Anthropology, he has published widely on the human past, but also on the anthropology of the human future in space  settlement, most recently in Scientific American magazine and in his book Emigrating Beyond Earth: Human Adaptation and Space Colonization (Springer 2012). He aims to advance human space exploration by developing new technologies and techniques. Dr. Smith has spoken for NASA managers and has consulted in the private space industry on life-support and space suit matters. In Winter 2014 he spoke at Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and TEDX Brussels, and in 2015 he presented space suit technology as a speaker at both TEDX Portland and the Oregon Institute of Technology; the technology was also demonstrated in 2018 at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. Dr. Smith’s research on the genetics of space settlement and constructing an evolutionary, adaptive paradigm for space settlement have been published in the scholarly journal Acta Astronautica; he has also published innovative space technology in the Journal of the British Interplanetary SocietyA diver, paraglider pilot and hot air balloon pilot, Dr. Smith is applying his many years of sailing, mountaineering and solo Arctic icecap expeditions to devising ways to explore the surface of Mars. The author of nearly ten books–including An Atlas of Human Prehistory (Cognella 2016) and The Fact of Evolution (Penguin Random House 2011)—he is currently completing Principles of Space Anthropology (Springer 2018 or 2019), a graduate-level technical foundation of a science of human space settlement.  Dr. Smith’s website is cameronmsmith.com, where links may be found to his many interviews and media profiles.

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