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In times of our childhood, a bipolar structure prevailed in the World, and two utopias could be clearly recognized.
In our dreams we would look at the stars and we were able to visualize Man as part of a Universe, in its cosmic conception, leaving the whole of Mankind as a tiny dust speck in the galactic ocean. Nowadays, information networks and virtual reality present a panorama without polarities, in an extension without cardinal points. Where is the South, where is the North? Where are the East and the West?
In network cyberspace, power is not linked to orientation (which is closely connected to gravity and the laws of star mechanics). Similar to the problems of location and coordination that an astronaut faces in zero gravity, all the possible directions demand the same effort to be defeated.
Today, Man is defined by virtue of his interconnection capabilities, and power is based on the amount of information units per second he can access to and process (or traffic in with), something that technicians call "bandwidth".
Of course, there are rich and poor on this net, as there are also main arteries and small peripheral vessels. The less developed have had access to small streams far away from the main branches.
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On the other hand, during our childhood we lived with the latent threat of self-destruction. A species infinitely small with enough power to eliminate itself. It was the era of the beginning of ecology as a response to self-aggression.
The chance that seeing the Earth from outer space gave us, by moving away from the world and looking at it from enough distance to cover its entirety was what provided ecologists with their main weapon: the world we were living in was behaving as a complex biological system, which we were attacking. Peace was not a blessing in itself, it was what we had to achieve so as not to harm this organism we were starting to get acquainted with.
Man, or, in general, living organisms, placed in space, seemed fragile and struggling to survive in a frozen medium without oxygen.
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Nowadays, computers are actually "extensions" of the body, or even prosthetics (sci-fi is starting to show hybrid bionic mechanisms, or machines with added living tissue). Moreover, lately we have heard of the idea of communities with network-like collective brains, with cancer-like growth, hungry for capturing biological organisms where to insert themselves in. (These organisms probably have a higher developed self-reconstructing capability).
Nothing could be closer to the net-surfing paranoia: fear to be suddenly captured and to lose control of your own intellectuality, our neurons now another extension of this circuit.
The paranoid fantasies of the sixties were, as in "2001, a Space Odyssey", that a great Computer (from which man was aseptically separated, "individuated") rebelled against Mankind and seized control: we as slaves of our own creation. But it was a tangible enemy, as well determined as the Soviet Union for the United States and vice versa. Our defense hypothesis was to cut off the main switch feeding that organism. In the imagination of today’s sci-fi, the enemy is atomized and our defense strategy could be no other than guerrilla warfare: there is no main switch and there is no possibility of "deadly wounding" this organism, that has learned from biology how to replace the functions of a dead cell by another, with alternative ways to continue the endless flow of information on the Net.
The story of Laika, the dog, shows different facets that can be connected to these speculations.
First of all, it is shown as the best example of the fragility of life outside of the protecting terrestrial atmosphere. Even if up until the moment of Laika´s launch to space other experiments had been conducted with dogs undergoing the effects of acceleration and very short zero gravity tests, the precise and accurate gauging equipment for Laika´s muscle reactions as well as the many silver electrodes placed in her body gave this experiment a very important scientific value towards voyages with a human crew.
Regrettably, and this is connected with the above mentioned Cold War speculations, this experiment was carried out before its time, without having yet developed the atmosphere re-entering techniques, reason why since its conception the experiment would end with Laika as a martyr of Space science. Moreover some scholars considered this experiment as incomplete which allows us to see the Soviet determination to place in space heavier objects than the Americans and at a higher altitude. Largely, these initial successes were due to the speed with which the Russians had a reliable carrier rocket, in part a technological heir of nazi Germany experiments.
Lastly, we can elaborate a hypothesis about why the Russian experiments included dogs (Laika was not the only one sent to space by the Soviets, but Americans preferred chimpanzees, rats, etc.). Throughout Soviet history, dogs were used as lab animals (remember Pavlov’s experiments on conditioned reflexes). Besides, as an interesting remark, the original Soviet edition of the novel "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne included an illustration of a dog very similar to Laika travelling on that cannon ball.
There are many hypothesis about Laika´s true cause of death.
In a book that I read in my childhood (probably not because of lack of information but because it was a children´s book) it was said that Laika returned to Earth. It could be speculated that she lacked oxygen before the spacecraft melted on re-entering the atmosphere, or maybe she suffered the worst of endings (or maybe a pious poison dosage in the feeding machine), but she has definitely made history as the first beating heart in space orbit, and also the first one to die on reentering the atmosphere.
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of her launching, those of us who spent our childhood looking at the stars dreaming of Man in harmony with the Universe and discovering new worlds recognize in Laika a heart like our own.
Ricardo Pons, 1997