Laika wore a flight suit to keep her sensors in place, but she did not wear a space suit. Her sealed capsule inside Sputnik II, however, helped minimized the noise and vibration from the rocket. These sensations were familiar to her too, as she had trained to tolerate them. To avoid injury during the rocket’s ascent, Laika was secured with restraining chains while lying on her belly. Lying on her back would have been the best way to endure the g-force of acceleration, but as Pettit observed, dogs “are not meant to lie on their back. Dogs lie down [on their belly], and a dog isn’t used to having a lot of force on their belly either. The geometry of a dog is not something that could take a lot of force. I think it would probably be more unpleasant for a dog [to ride a rocket into space] than it would be for a human being.”
The acceleration of the rocket, then, put a lot of force on Laika’s belly, making it hard for her to breathe. This is why her respiration increased so dramatically. She was probably taking rapid, shallow breaths, trying to keep air in her lungs as the rocket pressed up beneath her. Once she entered microgravity, the noise and vibration and the tremendous force of acceleration vanished. She would have felt much more at ease, but for her unbearable thirst.
Imagining Laika up there in her spacecraft, confined in that small capsule, makes me feel lonely. This loneliness is my loneliness, of course, but I am not the only one to feel it. Many of the people I spoke with in working on this book were quick to inquire about Laika’s loneliness and to express their own loneliness when faced with the thought of her up there alone in space, with the thought of her dying in space. Why do we feel this way when we imagine Laika spinning across the roof of the world, forever interred in that metal can?
Lots of people surrender to animal emotions, dog emotions especially. Can we know how a dog feels when we think of them as feeling like us? In fact, we depend on them to accede to the way we feel, even as we cast our feelings upon them. Knowing this, it is still worth asking: Did Laika get lonely in her spacecraft? Was Laika lonely as she died? Can we say, even, that dogs feel loneliness? Or did Laika feel a sense of purpose in the way that a working dog can? Or perhaps she felt nothing at all. We know that dogs can feel, that they have feelings. Anyone who has ever lived with a dog knows this. We know too that our dogs respond to our feelings. They sense our anger at them, and our anger at each other. Dogs know when people are fighting, when they are in conflict and distress. Dogs pick up these feelings and are then equally in distress. Dogs know when people are happy and at their ease. Dogs then are happy and at ease. A dog knows when another dog is in pain, or when we are in pain, when we are suffering from a wound in the body or a wound in the heart. Our dogs are drawn to our wounds, drawn to us in the center of our grief, drawn to our tears. It follows, then, that dogs might feel lonely.
In a study published by the Association for Psychological Science, social psychologist John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago and his team assert that “loneliness is not a uniquely human phenomenon.” Animals of various kinds, especially social mammals, do in fact experience loneliness. Their loneliness, and ours, can be measured by physical responses in the body, namely by “a significant increase in plasma cortisol,” a stress hormone. And why do animals feel lonely? Because loneliness is an adaptation, writes Cacioppo; it “represents a generally adaptive predisposition in response to a discrepancy between an animal’s preferred and actual social relations that can be found across phylogeny.” Loneliness, he writes, “has evolved as a signal to change behavior—very much like hunger, thirst, or physical pain.” In manageable doses, then, loneliness triggers a response in the individual to establish or repair social relationships. Social animals need each other, and so loneliness can help keep a group or pair tightly bound, which betters each individual’s chances of survival. As an adaptive predisposition, loneliness has been here a long time; it was here on Earth before humans.
When I spoke with astronaut Donald Pettit about his experiences in space, I asked him about loneliness. Pettit is a good man to ask such a question, because he has spent a lot of time in space: 370 days, with thirteen hours of accumulated spacewalk time. In 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board, Pettit was living and working on the ISS. His mission there was extended to six months, and he had to return to Earth in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft because space shuttle flights had been suspended for the next two and half years. With the space shuttle grounded, I asked him: Did he feel lonely up there in space? Was he not struck by the fear that he might never get home? He is a scientist, a chemical engineer, and I imagine his mind is logically and pragmatically arranged, but even so, everyone gets lonely sometimes.
“There is no sense of loneliness in space at all,” Pettit told me. “This is a myth I often get asked about and there’s absolutely no loneliness. There’s no isolation.” He went on to say that on the ISS, you’re only 240 miles away from Earth, which is just a bit more than the distance from Dallas to Houston. You can get home in a few hours. “It isn’t like you’re going to Alpha Centauri or something,” the closest star system to ours at 4.3 light-years away, Pettit said. “You are really close to Earth. If you go to some place like Antarctica [where Pettit has traveled], you are more isolated and more remote than if you are in space.”
I asked Pettit about Mars. Did he think loneliness would be a factor on a future mission to Mars? “It may become more of an issue the farther you go from home,” Pettit said. “I think part of it is the selection of crew members.” If you have to be in touch with family two or three times a day, he told me, “a trip to Mars may not be the kind of thing you want to do. But the kind of people that seem to gravitate toward space exploration are the same kind of people that can get on a sailing ship in the seventeenth century and disappear for three or four years.”
American astronaut Jerry Linenger had a different experience in space. In Off the Planet, his account of his five-month mission on the Russian space station Mir in 1997, Linenger “was astounded at how much [he] had underestimated the strain of living cut off from the world in an unworldly environment. The isolation was extreme in every way.” Part of Linenger’s feelings stemmed from carrying the burden of responsibility on the station: taking care of other people’s science projects, coping with malfunctioning life-support systems, looking at “the same two faces [his Russian crewmates] for months on end.” Linenger was able to “generate the intellectual and emotional stamina required to get the job done because [he] knew that there would be an end to it all.” But unlike Pettit, Linenger felt cut off, isolated, deeply lonely.
Most of us get lonely. Loneliness is fundamental to the human condition. To be human is to be lonely. We are, writes Ben Lazare Mijuskovic in Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature, “intrinsically alone and irredeemably lost.” Everything we do, even our consciousness, is driven by an underlying motivation to avoid loneliness, to avoid isolation. “Forlornness constitutes the very essence of man’s existence.” And what is so painful about loneliness is that we feel something missing deep in the self, but we do not necessarily know what it is or how to fix it. We do not know what it is that we do not have. Loneliness is the “absence of an awareness of any thing or sensation; it is a meaningless nothingness,” Mijuskovic writes. And unfortunately, loneliness is a mainspring of modern civilization. Our ancestors lived in small, intimate, highly communal groups. Civilization, especially Western civilization, has broken and fractured such communities and fed us the lie that strength resides in the individual, alone.