J$P Instant Transcript! Ray Bradbury talks to Neil Cavuto about Mars and beyond.

From Your World with Neil Cavuto, November 23 2004:

NEIL CAVUTO [FOX NEWS]: One teeny little item that was missed in the lame duck session of Congress’s attempt at a budget: more spending for a mission to Mars. Now not exactly John Kennedy’s salvo to land a man on the moon before the decade is out, but no doubt the kind of news likely to cheer one Ray Bradbury, an unabashed space enthusiast who says it is high time to get crazy for the heavens all over again. Mr Bradbury, the man who first made these intergalactic musings more than a half a century ago in The Martian Chronicles and forever changed the way we look at science-fiction with the likes of Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, Illustrated Man, he joins me now. Now at the risk of sounding like a suck-up, over my life I’ve made it a point to read almost everything this man has written. There. Enough of my shameless sucking up. Without any further ado, the man who was bigger than NASA before NASA was even around, Ray Bradbury. Welcome Mr Bradbury, good to have you.

RAY BRADBURY [AUTHOR]: It’s a pleasure to be here, thank you.

CAVUTO: You’re saying we have to get gung-ho about space again, but we’re not. What’s wrong?

BRADBURY: Well we should never have left the moon. We should go back now. It should be the base for going off to Mars. The most wonderful night in the history of the world was the night we landed on the moon. The whole world celebrated. We were doing something for the world, something peaceful, instead of destroying we were building. We’ve got to start building again, and I think the moon is the base for going on to Mars.

CAVUTO: Ray, you know a lot of people who look at those visions say they’re expensive visions, we can’t afford them. What do you say?

BRADBURY: Well we’re spending a billion dollars a day on armaments. All we’d have to do is, one day a year, take that billion dollars away from the armaments and build the rockets to go back to the moon and move on to Mars. It’s not expensive at all. The armaments we’re building do nothing for the future but protect us. Yes, that’s great, but we have to have more than protection. We have to have hope for the future, and space travel is the answer to that.

CAVUTO: Let me ask you, when you came out with The Martian Chronicles, that was, what, 1950?

BRADBURY: That’s correct, yes.

CAVUTO: OK, so now we’re fascinated with Mars all over again with these missions that have come and gone. So far no signs of life per se. So what would be the value of a man or woman going to Mars?

BRADBURY: Well, we will become the Martians. There’s no life on Mars, we will put life on Mars. There was very little life on the American continent 500 years ago. There were various tribes of Indians roaming all over an almost-empty continent. But we filled it with people. We didn’t realize when we started we were going to fill it with 300 million people from every country in the world, so we didn’t anticipate this. So Mars is empty, it’s only waiting for us, it’s a threshold for our future generations 500 years from now, a thousand years from now, a million years from now. The future is vast, and we will become the Martians.

CAVUTO: All right, I know I think you’re 84 years young, I’m a little bit younger than you, are we going to see alien life in our lifetime?

BRADBURY: We are the alien life. Sometimes we are alien to ourselves. No, we are going to move on to Mars, and then to Alpha Centauri, and this will guarantee the immortality of mankind. We grew up on this planet earth, we never understood how we got here, we have dozens of religions trying to explain what we are and what created us and for what purpose. I happen to like mankind very much. We are a mixture of possibilities. I describe us as too soon from the cave, too far from the stars. We’re the in-between generation. We have much to forgive ourselves for, but we’re on our way, and we’ve only been out of the cave for a few thousand years, and our destination is Mars and other planets. Because we love being alive, we love the gift of life, and we want to preserve that. That’s what space travel is all about.

CAVUTO: But I sometimes think Ray, and I agree with a column you wrote a few days ago, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, correct me if I’m wrong, and in that you said we kind of need to get crazy about it again, or maybe we need to be enticed by competition again, much as this country and the former Soviet Union was in the race to land a man on the moon. That maybe that kind of thing needs to be re-ignited in order to get the passion back, but I don’t see that happening, do you?

BRADBURY: Well, right now there is no competition. If Red China tomorrow announced it was going to go the moon, and go on to Mars and establish Mars as a Red Chinese civilization, we would immediately follow and compete. There’s this--

CAVUTO: So we need that. In other words, we need the other guys or we need a race. Without a race it’s not going to happen.

BRADBURY: The history of mankind is the Italian explorers, Spain did it first then England got jealous of Spain--

CAVUTO: That’s right.

BRADBURY: --and France got jealous of England--

CAVUTO: Well, France was always jealous of everyone, right Ray?

BRADBURY: Oh yeah. And so the history of the world was changed by jealousy and competition. It’s in the male animal. That’s the way we were built. There’s nothing wrong with that; that’s the way we function.

CAVUTO: Ray, I’m very happy that you mentioned Italian explorers first, by the way. But let’s talk a little bit about what we can expect out of leadership. President Bush and this Congress have committed some moneys, although paltry by real standards, for Martian travel. But nothing like what we had in the beginning in the early 60s with John Kennedy’s mission to land a man on the moon before the decade is out. So what do you think of this latest commitment to Mars? Is it halfhearted or what?

BRADBURY: It’s a beginning but it has to grow. I would like to see this competition grow, and if there’s anything I can do to cause it to happen, but right now there’s no one in Congress, in the Senate or in the House of Representatives, that really believes in space travel. I’d like to have a chance to go to Washington moreover myself and speak to the Representatives to see what we can do to start the competition.

CAVUTO: Your own view, I know you’ve been recognized by the NEA and so many other groups, I believe you’re wearing an NEA medal right now, do you, is this your cause for the rest of your life?

BRADBURY: It’s been the cause for all of my life. Because if we stay here on Earth, two things might happen. We talked about nuclear winter a few years ago remember--

CAVUTO: Right, right.

BRADBURY: --that the Earth might freeze and mankind die--

CAVUTO: Do you think that’s going to happen?

BRADBURY: No.

CAVUTO: No?

BRADBURY: And even when Carl Sagan said it would I didn’t believe it, and I knew Carl. Or when perhaps the sun would explode one day, and again mankind would be destroyed. And we are a danger to ourselves at times. So we have the three dangers; we have to care about life so intensely that we put together this huge program which will exhilarate mankind all over the world. Everyone--

CAVUTO: All right, oh I’m sorry Ray, a commercial break comes whether you and I are talking or not. But Ray, it’s been an honor; thank you so much for coming on, I appreciate it.

BRADBURY: Thank you so much. God bless you.

CAVUTO: All right, Ray Bradbury of course. Think of this. About 55 years ago he was writing about stuff that would literally come to pass before anyone knew it. Ray Bradbury.