“If you’re doing something mediocre, if you’re something to fill in time, life really isn’t worth living, and I recommend suicide,” says Ray Bradbury near the end of this interview with James Day in this 1970s interview. “I can’t understand people not living at the top of their emotions constantly, living with some sense of enthusiasm, some sense of joy, some sense of creativity. I don’t care how small level it is. If you’re a mathematician and you love figures, great. I don’t understand that. I’ve never been any good at figures. But if you love it and you tell me you love it, boy are you lucky.”Bradbury was himself fiercely in love with the ideas that fueled his speculative fiction. In just the last 16 minutes highlighted here, the visionary writer is an illuminated fountain of public intellectualness, holding forth on Writing, Libraries, Children’s Books, Space Travel, Immortality, Information Overload, Science Fiction, Existential Peace and Love.Bradbury’s tough love for the future, he made clear often, was grounded in his indifference to what anyone else thought. “When I started writing seriously,” he told Playboy in a 1996 interview, “I made the major discovery of my life – that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don’t listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.” His reach-for-the-stars attitude also made him a fearsome critic of NASA, in a Neil de Grasse Tyson kind of way:*How come we’re looking at our shoes instead of at the great nebula in Orion? Where did we mislay the moon and back off from Mars? The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads. JFK, for a brief moment in his last year, challenged us to go to the moon. But even he wasn’t motivated by astronomical love. He cried, “Watch my dust!” to the Russians, and we were off. But once we reached the moon, the romance started to fade. Without that, dreams don’t last. That’s no surprise – material rewards do last, so the history of exploration on earth is about harvesting rich lodes. If NASA’s budgeters could be convinced that there are riches on Mars, we would explode overnight to stand on the rim of the Martian abyss. We need space for reasons we have not as yet discovered, and I don’t mean Tupperware.
P: Tupperware?
B: NASA feels it has to justify everything it does in practical terms.
And Tupperware was one of the many practical products that came out of space travel. NASA feels it has got to flimflam you to get you to spend money on space. That’s b.s. We don’t need that. Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that’s life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever. P: What’s the biggest mistake NASA has made? B: It should have done the space shuttle before the Apollo missions. The shuttle is a big mailbox, an expensive experimental lab. It’s not nearly as exciting as it should be. It should have been launched first to circle the earth, which is all it’s doing. After that, it should have been sent to the moon, and the program could have ended there. Then we could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves – that’s a real religious activity. That’s what space travel can be – relating ourselves to the universe.While Bradbury’s ebullient love for the future sounds something like the techno-excitement of singularitarians like Kurzweil and Jason Silva, he swore that he didn’t actually want to live forever. “I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them,” he told Playboy. “That’s immortality. That’s the only immortality I care about.”
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And Tupperware was one of the many practical products that came out of space travel. NASA feels it has got to flimflam you to get you to spend money on space. That’s b.s. We don’t need that. Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that’s life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever. P: What’s the biggest mistake NASA has made? B: It should have done the space shuttle before the Apollo missions. The shuttle is a big mailbox, an expensive experimental lab. It’s not nearly as exciting as it should be. It should have been launched first to circle the earth, which is all it’s doing. After that, it should have been sent to the moon, and the program could have ended there. Then we could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves – that’s a real religious activity. That’s what space travel can be – relating ourselves to the universe.While Bradbury’s ebullient love for the future sounds something like the techno-excitement of singularitarians like Kurzweil and Jason Silva, he swore that he didn’t actually want to live forever. “I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them,” he told Playboy. “That’s immortality. That’s the only immortality I care about.”