Terraforming Mars vs Earth’s Anthropocene

Starting with the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution 15.000 years ago, it began an epoch of significant human impact on Earth, which we extremely experience nowadays. The latter has been defined as Anthropocene by several scholars in the past century. In the last decades, with the beginning of space exploration, humans have started to impact not just the Earth, but the entire Universe and latest theories suggest that mankind should become a wandering multi-planetary species in order to survive and, eventually, to save Earth’s ecosystem. However, in every mission of planets exploration it is not directly a human to impact on the environment. Therefore, it would be incorrect to talk about a spread of Anthropocene. Let us take the example of Mars, that seems to be the most promising planet to host a human settlement: the planet exploration has been carried out by machines and so will be for the first steps of the colonization. Therefore, we should rather talk about Anthroporobotocene, considering robot as the term to define a machine that automatically performs tasks on behalf of a man. The present contribute provides an overview on the robots that has been used and that will be used in the space exploration. It also analyses similarities and differences between the biggest changes that Earth’s landscapes faced since the starting of the Anthropocene era and the ones that will occur on Mars in the next decades.