Ray Bradbury Quotes

My sons and their wives landed on Mars to start another race.

Eventually we must leave Earth-at least a certain number of our progeny must as our sun approaches the end of its solar life cycle. But just as terrestrial explorers have always led the way for settlers, this will also happen extraterrestrially. Earth is our cradle, not our final destiny.

Going to Mars would evolve humankind into a two-planet species.

We need to begin thinking about building permanence on the Red Planet, not just have voyagers do some experiments, plant a flag and claim success. Having them go there, repeat this, in my view, is dim-witted. Why not stay there?

I think humans will reach Mars, and I would like to see it happen in my lifetime.

In my opinion, future space exploration will require us to inhabit the moon, initially, and later Mars. This is a humongous task for any one nation to carry out.

Vegas is the city of temptation. I think, perhaps, it is an experiment by NASA. If we're going to send people to Mars, how will we create false economies and cultures to satisfy them? Vegas has the answer. People go there when they've nothing left to lose.

As important as the civil rights movement was, I think what will rise to the top is that we left Earth in that time.

By the year 2000 we will undoubtedly have a sizable operation on the Moon, we will have achieved a manned Mars landing and it's entirely possible we will have flown with men to the outer planets.

The first human beings to land on Mars should not come back to Earth. They should be the beginning of a build-up of a colony/settlement, I call it a 'permanence'.

I think we're a long ways from really putting colonies of people out there who would live their whole lives out there in space. I don't see that happening for quite some time.

Let me end with an explanation of why I believe the move into space to be a human imperative. It seems to me obvious in too many ways to need listing that we cannot much longer depend upon our planet's relatively fragile ecosystem to handle the realities of the human tomorrow. Unless we turn human growth and energy toward the challenges and promises of space, our only other choice may be the awful risk, currently demonstrable, of stumbling into a cycle of fratricide and regression which could end all chances of our evolving further or of even surviving.

Unless we are able to commit to a permanent growing settlement [on Mars], then I don't think just going there with humans and coming back is worth doing. The expense of planning to come back is like the people who left Europe to come to America and then to turn around and go back to Europe, it really doesn't make any sense at all.

Mars is empty now. Five hundred years from now, it'll be full of people.

As far as actually setting up colonies of people who would live their whole lives in space, I think we're a long ways from doing that yet, and I think we have many, many decades before we could be able to even consider something like that.

It might be helpful to realize, that very probably the parents of the first native born Martians are alive today.

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.

I predict the future of this earthly human race is that having made a mess of Earth they'll move to outer space.

About First Landing by Robert Zubrin: Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.

To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea.

During the next 50 years, in countless cycles, in countless entrepreneurial companies, this let's just go and do it mentality will help us finally get off the planet and irreversibly open the space frontier. The capital and tools are finally being placed into the hands of those willing to risk, willing to fail, willing to follow the dreams.

We're going to leave this planet at some point further than we have, we're going to go beyond the moon, we're going to go to mars. We all kind of know that on some level, I think actually. So there's an inevitability to human evolution, this being the next step.

There is very little doubt, in my mind, that what the next monumental achievement of humanity will be the first landing by an Earthling, a human being, on the planet Mars.

I would say that failure to terraform Mars constitutes failure to live up to our human nature and a betrayal of our responsibility as members of the community of life itself

The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.