Stay. Good Boy.
What it would mean to build a world where the “goodest boy” cannot follow
29 August 2025
Dogs have been part of humanity’s space story almost from the moment space became a destination rather than an abstraction. Before astronauts were celebrated as heroes, before mission patches and televised launches turned orbital flight into spectacle, dogs were already there. Sometimes they were subjects of experiment, sometimes survivors, sometimes mascots, sometimes stand-ins for something softer and more familiar than rockets and risk. Over and over, when humans imagine leaving Earth, a dog appears beside them.
The story begins uncomfortably. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Laika, a stray plucked from the streets of Moscow, aboard Sputnik 2. She was never meant to return. Her mission was not exploration so much as proof that a living body could endure launch, weightlessness, and confinement long enough to justify the next step. Laika died in orbit, and with her death came one of the earliest ethical reckonings of the Space Age: the realization that technological progress could be measured not only in kilometers and payloads, but in suffering quietly absorbed by those who had no say in the matter.
A few years later, Belka and Strelka made it back alive. Their safe return in 1960 helped clear the psychological and political path to Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight. This is the version of the story space agencies prefer to tell, the one with a capsule landing intact and a living creature emerging to applause. Survival replaced sacrifice, and the dog shifted from cautionary tale to reassuring precedent.
From there, dogs drifted steadily from laboratory subjects into symbols. Snoopy, NASA’s adopted beagle, became an emblem of astronaut safety and institutional humility, immortalized in the Silver Snoopy Award given to those who quietly protect human life in space. Fiction followed a similar arc. Cosmo the Spacedog, Marvel’s reimagining of a Soviet space canine, does not just survive his mission but gains intelligence and agency, as if popular culture were determined to correct history’s harsher drafts.
More recently, dogs have begun to appear not in archives or comic books, but in our visions of Mars. In one of NASA’s “Dune Scouts” posters, a suited human stands against a Martian horizon while a small dog waits nearby, helmeted and calm. The image is not a technical proposal. It is an emotional one. It suggests that Mars, for all its strangeness, will still be a place where companionship fits, where the architecture of home can be carried across planets.
This is the quiet gravitational pull dogs exert on our thinking about the future. They are not merely animals we bring along. They are shorthand for normalcy, loyalty, and care. A dog in a spacesuit reassures us that the future will not feel entirely alien, that even on another world, we will recognize ourselves.
Which is precisely why the question of dogs on Mars deserves more seriousness than a poster or a punchline allows. Because beneath the cultural comfort dogs provide lies a harder, less sentimental problem. Not whether humans can bring dogs with them to Mars, but whether Mars can ever be a place that offers a dog something like a good life.
To which Dr. Clive Wynne would most certainly say…no.
He is a professor of psychology at Arizona State University and directs the Canine Science Collaboratory, a group devoted to understanding and improving the dog-human relationship. He has spent his career thinking about what dogs actually are, rather than what we wish they were. And when the conversation turns toward Mars and pets, his answer is blunt in a way that feels almost jarring until you realize it is, in its own way, a kind of compassion.
“I honestly cannot see how you could take dogs to Mars,” he says, not because it is impossible, but because he cannot see how to do it without violating something important: the dog’s welfare.
Mars, in other words, is not just a test of our engineering. It is a test of our love.
Our Oldest Invention
People like to talk about dogs as if they have been here forever, as if the dog is part of the natural furniture of the world. But Wynne reminds us that dogs are not as ancient as humans. There have not always been dogs. Something “doggy-like,” as he puts it, probably branched off from wolves around 20,000 years ago. Then, as the last Ice Age ended roughly 14,000 years ago, the relationship “really started to bloom,” turning into the bond we recognize today.
That timeline matters because it reframes the dog as an invention. Not in the cynical sense, but in the profound sense: the dog-human bond is one of the most successful co-evolutionary partnerships on Earth. A living, breathing technology that runs on emotion.
And that emotional technology is, by Wynne’s account, the heart of why dogs matter. He pushes back on the popular idea that dogs are beloved mainly because they are intelligent. Sure, some are sharp. But intelligence is not the main event.
“What makes them so wonderful to have around is that they so very clearly love us,” he says. He offers the scene that every dog owner knows: the happy dance at the door, the unrestrained celebration of your return. It is not exceptional. It is the point. Dogs love with an openness that humans rarely permit themselves. Even in cultures that are not especially demonstrative, dogs cut straight through.
Wynne calls it “tremendously therapeutic,” especially now, when loneliness has become a defining feature of modern life. It is easy to roll your eyes at that line until you remember how many people speak to their dog in the tone they reserve for nobody else, how many people can survive a day of quiet only because the quiet contains a soft presence that feels like devotion.
There is research behind this feeling, too, and it shows up in your transcript as one of those “wild little science nuggets” that sticks. When people lock eyes with their dog, oxytocin rises. It is not just sentiment; it is chemistry. The gaze becomes a feedback loop: you look, you soften, you touch, the bond deepens, and both bodies respond.
On Mars, where the interior walls will be spotless and the outside world will be lethal, the idea of bringing a creature that can trigger that kind of emotional physiology is… intoxicating. You can almost hear the mission planners, the psychologists, the people writing morale reports, murmuring, “Maybe we should.”
And then Wynne does the other half of his job, which is to keep us honest about what we do when love becomes inconvenient.
He points out that in the United States, millions of dogs enter shelters each year. People abandon dogs. Not because dogs stop loving, but because humans do. Or, more often, because life becomes heavy and dogs are easier to let go of than the humans who share your DNA. Wynne’s skepticism is not cruel. It is a reality check: even in a culture that treats dogs like family, the bond is not the same as the bond to children. We talk about dogs like they are irreplaceable. We treat them like they are.
This is not an argument against dogs. It is an argument for the seriousness of what it would mean to bring them somewhere they cannot thrive.
“I honestly cannot see how you could take dogs to Mars.”
A World Devoid Of Smell
Wynne’s central objection is almost painfully simple: dogs need an outside.
Not just for exercise, but for meaning. For sensory life. For the flood of information that comes through smell, for the act of chasing, for the ritual of sniffing lampposts and reading the neighborhood like a newspaper. Dogs do not “work out” in the way humans can be coaxed to work out. A human can run on a treadmill for health, grimly, dutifully, aware of why it matters. A dog runs because the world is interesting. Because the world is loud with scent and movement and possibility.
A spacecraft is not loud with possibility. It is loud with recycling.
Even the idea of a small dog does not solve the problem. Wynne points out that smaller dogs tend to be more energetic. Anyone who has lived with a Chihuahua knows the manic electricity of a creature that seems to run on pure opinion. You cannot cheat the dog’s needs by shrinking the dog.
And the transit is only the first layer. Mars itself is worse. When Wynne says, “Once you get there, you’re never going outside for a walk,” he is not exaggerating in spirit, even if the details will evolve. Early habitats will be sealed. EVAs will be scheduled, suited, monitored. Mars will not have casual errands. It will not have “I’m just going to pop out for ten minutes.” The outdoors will be an environment you enter like a laboratory.
You might imagine a doggy spacesuit and feel clever. Wynne does not argue that it is physically impossible. He argues something more uncomfortable: even if you can make it work, the question is whether you should.
Because what would a suited walk on Mars give a dog? It might give motion. It might give novelty. But it would not give the thing the dog is built to harvest: a world thick with smells, social signals, trails, mess, and history. Dogs are not only walkers; they are readers. Their joy is informational.
Mars is a planet that will starve a dog of information.
This is where the NASA mock image you referenced becomes almost haunting. A dog in a little suit looks adorable. It also looks like a misunderstanding. Like we have projected our own longing onto an animal without asking what the animal would want.
Wynne’s concern is not romantic. It is ethical. “I don’t want depressed dogs up in space,” he says. That line lands harder than it should because it suggests the kind of quiet cruelty humans are capable of when they believe they are doing something “for love.”
We Did It Before, And It Wasn’t Pretty
If you want a reminder of how easily we can rationalize animal suffering in the name of progress, you do not need to invent a Mars mission. You can look backward.
Dogs were the first living beings sent into orbit. Laika, a Moscow street dog, died. Wynne notes that the Soviets sent dozens of dogs later and “almost all of them survived,” but the survival came with a condition we would now call unacceptable: the dogs were strapped in. They could not move. The missions were short enough that the cruelty could be disguised as necessity.
A Mars transit is not a few days. It is months.
So when people say, “We’ve put dogs in space before,” what they often mean is, “We have already proved we can endure the guilt.” Which is not the same as proof of feasibility.
There is also something else hidden in that history: the dogs were not chosen because they were “best.” They were chosen because they were available. The Soviets scooped up strays because strays are hardy, because nobody would miss them in the same way, because ethics become easier when the victim is already socially disposable.
Mars will tempt us to repeat that logic. It will reward it, too. The pressure to optimize payloads and systems will make compassion feel like inefficiency. That is not a reason to abandon compassion. It is a reason to expect the temptation, to build moral friction into the plan.
“It’s very hard to find people who express their love for each other as openly and freely as our dogs do.”
Projections Of Ourselves
Just when it feels like the conversation has settled into a simple conclusion (no dogs, maybe cats, perhaps rats), Wynne drops a finding from his lab that makes the whole subject wobble again.
His PhD student, Holly Molinaro, studied how good people are at recognizing emotional expressions in dogs. The setup is deceptively simple: videos of a dog in situations you would expect to create different emotions (treats versus vacuum cleaners), shown to people who rate how the dog is feeling. People do fine when the context matches the emotion they expect. Then the researchers remix the videos. They pair the dog’s reaction to a treat with the image of the vacuum, and suddenly people’s judgments follow the human action, not the dog’s behavior.
“You might as well not have the dog in the picture,” Wynne says, because people’s answers are “100% driven by whatever dad was doing.”
This is an astonishing little knife twist, because it suggests that much of what we call “reading our dog” is actually reading ourselves. We project narrative onto the animal based on the context we recognize. Even the dog’s owner in the experiment struggled. The intuition that we know what our dog feels may be, at least in part, an illusion we maintain because it supports the relationship we want to have.
On Mars, projection will be everywhere. You will be surrounded by systems you must trust, people you must get along with, routines you must obey. You will need emotional relief, and you will search for it in whatever living beings share your habitat. If you bring a dog, you will tell yourself the dog is happy because you need the dog to be happy. You will interpret the dog’s behavior through your own emotional weather, because you do that already on Earth.
This finding does not prove we should not bring dogs. It proves something more unsettling: we might be capable of harming a dog while sincerely believing we are loving it.
Mars makes that danger sharper because the environment is so constrained that the dog’s suffering might be slow and subtle and easy to rationalize. Depression does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like a quiet animal who stops asking.
If Not Dogs…Then What?
If dogs cannot come early, something else will. You say the quiet part out loud in your conversation: even if it is not a good idea, it feels inevitable that humans will bring animals with them, because we always do, and because our emotional needs are part of survival whether we admit it or not.
Wynne hears the inevitability and tries to redirect it toward something smaller.
A dog is at least 20 pounds, plus food, plus waste, plus care, plus space, plus the moral responsibility of keeping it sane. For the mass of a dog, you could bring more supplies or even another person. Wynne’s calculus is practical in the way Mars demands: early on, a dog will look like dead weight to any mission architect who has to justify every kilogram.
But a rat is not 20 pounds. A gerbil, a hamster, even a carefully selected “friendly” rodent is a fraction of the mass and can still offer companionship. Not the same companionship, but some.
Here, the conversation gets weird in exactly the way Mars conversations should get weird. Wynne brings up the Soviet domestication experiments in Siberia, where scientists selectively bred silver foxes for tameness starting in 1958, choosing the friendliest individuals each generation. Over decades, they produced foxes that behave like dogs, with behaviors that look suspiciously like what we call affection. The same approach was later used with rats, producing lineages bred for friendliness.
This matters for Mars because it reframes the question of “pets” as a design problem. Not in a soulless way, but in an evolutionary way. Humans already designed dogs through thousands of years of living near them. Intentional breed culture is relatively modern, Wynne points out, but the broader arc of dogs is still a story of adaptation to us. Dogs thrived because they learned how to thrive around humans.
So what if Mars requires a new kind of companion animal? A creature selected not for hunting, herding, guarding, or even running, but for comfort in enclosed ecosystems. For affiliative behaviors that trigger human care. For low-resource maintenance.
Wynne describes it plainly: the bond may not be about “potential,” the ancient story of dogs as protectors or workers. It might be about behavior. Dogs “solicit our caring by showing caring behaviors towards us,” he says. The leaning in. The reaching for your hand when you stop petting. The button-pressing genius of a species that has learned to awaken tenderness.
If friendly rats do some version of that, then the emotional ecosystem of a Mars habitat could be built around animals that fit the constraints rather than forcing the constraints to contort around animals that do not.
This is not a future most people want to imagine. It is also, frankly, more plausible than the NASA dog suit fantasy.
“There is something about these animals that—they just connect with us.”
Mars Is A Cat Planet?
And then the cat people arrive, as they always do, slightly smug.
Wynne is careful here. He is not a cat researcher, but he acknowledges what many people have noticed: some cats are deeply engaged with humans. Others are not. Dogs are, in a sense, reliably affiliative. Cats are a grab bag. But cats come with one obvious advantage for Mars: we already accept keeping them indoors.
This is a revealing social detail. We have decided, collectively, that it is ethically acceptable to confine a cat more than it is a dog. People argue about indoor versus outdoor cats, and there are welfare trade-offs, but culturally, the indoor cat is normalized. The never-walked dog is suspect.
A Mars habitat is an indoor world by necessity. That cultural acceptance is not a scientific argument, but it is a political one. And Mars will be shaped by politics as much as by physics.
Cats also require less “outdoor sensory life” than dogs do, at least in the way we perceive it. They can watch the world through a window and seem content, even if we know that contentment is complicated. On Mars, the window will show rust and rock and a sky that never becomes truly blue. The cat will still watch. The human will still interpret that watching as companionship.
If dogs are a living technology of love, cats are a living technology of cohabitation. They do not need you in the same way. They do not declare devotion in the same way. But they can share space, and they can share quiet, and they can do it without requiring a daily pilgrimage into the lethal outdoors.
So yes, Mars might be a cat planet. Not because cats are better, but because the habitat is.
But Wait…
Wynne does not entirely close the door. In the late conversation, he says he can imagine pets becoming part of a larger, permanent colony, especially if the scale becomes something like a shopping mall, with enough interior space for animals and people to move. That image matters. It is a shift from “tin can” to “indoor world.”
If you could build a habitat with long corridors, open areas, varied textures, scent enrichment, play, social contact, and something like nature simulated inside, then the welfare argument changes. You might create an interior ecosystem rich enough for a dog to have a life, not just a survival.
But notice what that implies: bringing dogs to Mars is not a first-wave question. It is a civilization question. It requires a community that has decided it can afford not only to keep humans alive, but to give another species a life worth living.
That is a high bar. It is also, maybe, exactly the kind of bar a Mars civilization should be judged by.
We tend to imagine Mars settlement as a story of hard choices and rugged people. Wynne quietly flips the frame. The story might also be about tenderness. About the point at which a settlement is no longer just a survival outpost but an actual society, one that creates room for beings who do not contribute “practically” except by making life feel like more than labor.
If Mars never makes room for that, it will not be a colony. It will be a factory.
Signal Received
Dogs feel like part of the human blueprint because they have been intertwined with us for millennia, evolving into specialists in affection, in gaze, in the strange skill of pressing the tenderness button inside our chests. That makes them uniquely tempting as companions for the loneliest frontier we have ever attempted. But the very thing that makes them precious is what makes them ethically difficult on Mars: dogs do not just need food and oxygen. They need a world. They need sensory richness, freedom to move, the informational joy of smell and chase and discovery. A spacecraft and an early habitat cannot give them that without extraordinary effort, and we are dangerously good at convincing ourselves an animal is fine when what we are really reading is our own need.
The more realistic early Mars pets might be smaller creatures that can thrive in enclosed ecosystems, or animals we already accept as indoor companions, like cats, or even selectively bred “friendly” rodents that can still offer a thread of connection without demanding an impossible outdoors. Dogs may come later, if Mars ever grows into an indoor world big enough to give them something like a real life, not just survival.
And maybe that is the quiet moral test hiding inside the cute NASA concept art. Not whether we can put a dog in a little suit, but whether we can build a civilization mature enough to refuse what we want until what we love can truly flourish. *
Adapted from Joe Sweeney’s interview with Dr. Clive Wynne for the Aspiring Martians: Everyday Mars episode titled "Dogs on Mars" which aired on 26 August 2025.