DIALOGUE WITH LYNDON LAROUCHE

Ensuring Your Immortality

The following exchanges with Lyndon LaRouche took place immediately following his Feb. 15 keynote address to the Presidents' Day 2003 Conference of the International Caucus of Labor Committees and the Schiller Institute.

Question: I was wondering about the difference between metaphor and symbolism, and was wondering if you can explain the difference?

LaRouche: Well, metaphor is actually an idea. A simile is not, first of all. Metaphor pertains to the gaps in description. All the Classical dialogues of Plato involve the principle of metaphor. For example, in the case of the discovery of the principle of gravitation: That in decadent culture, which was Romantic culture, up through the 16th Century, or most of it, it was generally believed that what we could know in the physical universe was merely a description of some consistent pattern of behavior as observed with the senses.

Now, what Kepler showed, and this was the character of the metaphor, was that the orbit of Mars, in the first instance, was not circular, which makes it a fairly irregular motion, but worse than that, the motion within the ellipse was not uniform, even within the terms of the ellipse, but the motion was based on this principle of equal areas, equal time. So there was constant change in motion at all times. It was never uniform. It was always non-uniform.

Now on the basis of the fact that the orbit was elliptical, and then carry that further to show how the Solar System essentially functions in these terms, and on the basis of non-uniform motion, defined a principle of gravitation, based on an anomaly, or set of anomalies—the elliptical anomaly, the non-uniform motion anomaly, and others—to show that something existed outside ordinary sense-perceptual interpretation, which actually caused the universe to function the way it did.

So, therefore, anything which shows truthfully that in what people ordinarily believe from sense perception or mere description is not true, is a metaphor. And, for example, some idiot would say gravitation is defined by Galileo. It is not. So the difference between gravitation as defined by Galileo and Kepler is a metaphor. Newton: the same thing. Newton's concept is absurd. Newton actually plagiarized Galileo's interpretation of the publication of Kepler's New Astronomy. So Newton discovered nothing.

Newton's system was based on a plagiarism of Kepler's New Astronomy, an English edition, published in the latter part of the 17th Century, interpreted from the standpoint of the doctrine of Galileo. So, to use the term gravitation in the two cases is metaphorical, because it means two opposite things, completely different kinds of things under the circumstances.

All art means that. For example, the best case, of course, is simple Bachian counterpoint. You find if you change a direction, you get an opposition and an apposition, which creates an irony, which creates a metaphor. The whole basis of Bach's composition is all metaphor. It is not simple mechanical rules. They're ironies, and the irony becomes an idea, which emerges from the composition, which stands outside and above the composition.

This is true in great poetry. For example, the most famous case is Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." A short poem by him, and everything is in there. Now the irony there, the metaphor is very simple. Remember the Classic characteristic of Classical Greek sculpture is that instead of tombstone art, the figure is capture in mid-motion. So you are not looking at a fixed, standing body. You are looking at something captured in mid-motion, like a photograph in mid-motion.

Now, the principle for doing that is demonstrated by the catenary principle, otherwise known as the principle of least action, that is Leibniz's principle of least action. So therefore, what Keats is doing in describing that "truth is beauty" and so forth, and all these things about these figures captured in mid-motion, even though he is looking at a fixed object, a vase, an ancient vase, is a metaphor. And the metaphor is that, if you know what he is talking about, about Classical Greek sculpture, that sort of thing, you see the way he uses the idea that truth is beauty, and beauty is truth.

How does he make that equation? What do you mean, "truth is beauty and beauty is truth?" How did he make that equation? He did it! He referenced a metaphor in terms of the composition of this business. So a metaphor essentially means, what lies between the gaps in sense-perception. The principles, which are not seen through sense-perception, not seen by statistical deduction, but an irony of meaning, a complication in meaning. Where two words don't mean the same thing in the same sentence, but in a different context. That's metaphor. The use of any of these devices.

There is a famous book, which I first acquired in 1946 or '47, about that time. I picked it up in a bookstore. It was recently published in Boston, it was William Empson on the Seven Types of Ambiguity. I've referred to it a number of times; it's a good introduction to the subject: the difference of irony, the seven types of irony. Irony, and metaphor as a form of irony, is a way to understand how the English language is used.

Let me give one final example: "Ya know, people in school today don't know howda talk." They interpret words. They try to sound nice, while interpreting words, but they don't convey ideas. It is almost like you have ticker-tape talk.

A guy has a script in front of him, and he reads "tick, tick," ticker-tape talk. There are no ideas in what he says. There are words in there, but no ideas. You see it in bad actors: They don't say anything. They make sounds. They make noises. Whereas all great Classical art, great Classical drama, is based on this principle of metaphor and irony, just as scientific discovery is.

This is a subject in and of itself, and I've written a good deal on it, but that will do for the moment.

Question: Mr. LaRouche, as you know, as your convention is meeting today, there are demonstrations against the war going on in cities across the United States and across the world. Nevertheless, this Administration, along with the government of Britain, seems determined to go to war. More disturbing, however, is that behind that war, we seem to be moving into a matrix of religious war against Muslims, both in the United States and globally.

Our religion has been misrepresented as a violent one, and as one which supports terrorism. As I know you know that is not true. But would you please address what you see as the potential for the outbreak of full-scale religious war in this period.

LaRouche: First of all, do not accept the proposition in the terms delivered. The idea that someone in the West, for example, by some terrible misunderstanding, misapprehends Islam as inherently a violent religion—don't even believe it.

Don't believe the accusation. The people who make it don't believe it. So, why argue against them, when what they're saying they don't believe themselves.

What do they believe? ...

Now, what they believe is this: They believe, as the Roman Empire did: They believe in getting rid of Christianity. There is no question about that, and they are doing a fairly good job in the churches and elsewhere.

What they believe is, as the Romans did, that in order to control the planet as a whole, you've got to divide the planet into two principal areas: One area is the area you intend to rule under your system of law. The other part is the part you don't think it is worthwhile trying to rule, and you contain it by what the Romans called the limes policy.

You turn the Roman Legions loose on the borders of the Empire to commit genocide, as is being done in Africa today.

Now what they have decided is that, since the danger is, from their standpoint, that Eurasia might unite, as it is tending to unite now, western Europe will not survive without developing its market relations with East and South Asia. So, therefore, Eurasia as a whole—East, South, and West, and so forth—is an interdependent set of emerging national economies. These are the great areas of population, the great area of future growth of the planet. Therefore, Europe has a fundamental interest in relations with China, Russia, with India, with Southeast Asia, and so forth.

The Middle East is the crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The issue is not oil, although oil is an issue. The issue is the crossroads. The issue is to prevent Eurasia from becoming united in a system of cooperation, which becomes a threat to the kind of power that certain people in the United States and the Anglo-Dutch circles desire.

The rise of the United States to success with Lincoln's victory and the 1876 Centennial celebration of the United States' founding, at which point the United States represented the most effective economy on the planet—we were the world's leading economy, as a national economy.

The British were somewhat more powerful because they had more subjects from whom they could steal, but we, as a nation-state, were the most powerful economy on the planet. Therefore, there was imitation of the United States and this policy, in France; in the struggle for national independence in Italy; in Germany, from 1877 on, under Bismarck; in Russia, under Tsar Alexander II, and under Mendeleyev's influence; in Japan, under the influence of Henry C. Carey, in founding industrial Japan in the 1870s; and in the leadership for a new China, which was sponsored by the United States through the career and work of Sun Yat-sen.

So London saw this, then, and a crowd in New York as well—the banking crowd in New York—saw this as the greatest threat to their rule of the world, as an imperial maritime power. Therefore, they started World War I to prevent cooperation among these nations of Europe by putting them at each other's throats in Eurasia.

World War II was started for a very similar purpose called "geopolitics." What we are seeing today is another case of geopolitics. The difference is that a bunch of nuts in the United States, closely associated with the extreme right-wing Israelis around Sharon, Netanyahu, and other degenerates of that type—real fascists, and they call themselves fascists; they are fascists—are allied to the idea of an American empire.

Now this empire concept has been developed by a head of British Intelligence Arab Bureau, Bernard Lewis, now officially a Princeton professor, who is the key adviser, and has been since 1973, of both Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Their policy has been genocide against Africa and what they call the "Arc of Crisis" policy, under Brzezinski.

The policy is to cause the Islamic world to explode as a limes-targetted area to be destroyed. It has nothing to do with religion as such. It is a limes policy, of trying to maintain world rule, Roman-Empire style. And so they come up with all this garbage, which you'll get, like the question you asked. Go ask Bernard Lewis, who is head of the British Arab Bureau, which is a creation of the British India Office, which, after World War I, split off the Arab Bureau from the British East India Company as a separate operation under Glub Pasha in Jordan, and Bernard Lewis became the key planner for that. And, when Kissinger came in as the acting President of the United States with Nixon under him, then he was sent to Princeton to become a closer adviser and steerer of Henry Kissinger and Brzezinski.

The Kissinger-Brzezinski policy, which is related to the Bertrand Russell preventive-nuclear-war policy—this is pure evil. It is aimed at all of humanity, but it is aimed at Islam, both because of the crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and because 1.3 billion Muslims—if you put that part of culture into chaos, then you can not have peace in any part of Eurasia, and Eurasia is finished. And, therefore, you can rule the world. Rule the world, under the Emperor Ariel Sharon, or something like that.

So, one should not be taken in by these works and assume that the words are meant sincerely. These guys are worse than Hitler. They mean what they say they intend to do, but when they tell you their reasons and motives, they are lying. Do not give them the dignity of saying they are against Islam. They don't care what Islam is. It makes no difference to them. They are determined to kill, and they put a label "Islam" on the target, and that is all they care about. So, we should never give them the dignity of imagining that this crowd—.

Look, who are these guys? Think about who are they: What is Marc Rich? Marc Rich is the guy who was behind the penetration, directly, of the Clinton Presidency, through Al Gore. Marc Rich's lawyer is Lewis Libby, who is the key man for Dick Cheney. Who owns Joe Lieberman? Who owns McCain? What is the Hudson Institute? How many people in the United States, as politicians and others, are owned by names like Lauder, Bronfman, the Lansky mob, Max Fisher, and so forth and so on.

This is international organized crime, and these guys have become super-wealthy, at the time we have been destroying our agriculture and industry. So you have a bunch of people, who are second- and third-generation of straight criminals—mass criminals, and Marc Rich is a mass criminal in his own right. He is being hunted down in France for crimes he committed there.

These people—this is the constituency behind this, so don't dignify them by imagining they are some misguided religious fanatics. They are simply—their religion is crime. Their meeting reminds me of an infamous mock marriage ceremony performed publicly—homosexual marriage—performed publicly by the Emperor Nero.

Question: Mr. LaRouche, I am very puzzled by the apparent contradiction between the argument being advanced by President Bush and some members of his Administration to justify the war on Iraq: namely, they say, to bring freedom to the inhabitants of that country and the actions being undertaken by some of the same members of the President's cabinet—and this is where the contradiction comes in—seems to be directed at diminishing the freedom of people here in the United States.... Obviously, I'm referring to everything that is going on under the rubric of Homeland Security, perhaps the latest example of this is the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003.

I'm sorry, but it seems to me that when Attorney General John Ashcroft speaks of freedom, he is not referring to the same concept that Abraham Lincoln might have referred to. Will you please comment on this, and how you assess the danger?

LaRouche: The first thing you are going to say is the year 2000 national election was a bummer, and you are seeing the fruits of that tree. It is dropping on us all over the place.

The question—pose it another way: Obviously, obviously—I mean, this guy Ashcroft is a racist of the most simple-minded, foolish type. He is really a mess. All these acts—it's a mess. There is no rationale to it. It is insane. The President is a poor fellow, who needs a protector. I mean that seriously. You have a sitting President, in my conception of this fellow, he needs protection, especially, from Cheney, from Rumsfeld, from Ashcroft, and so forth. I am sure that in President George W. Bush, Jr., there must be somewhere this spark of humanity, which will respond to the idea that he would like to become a President, if he has to put up with kind of job, which he probably doesn't like anyway—they talked him into it. I don't think he really wanted the job in the first place. That if he could be a good President, and get out of that place alive, and feel that he had actually become—"Hey, I was a good President—the first two years were not too good, but the second two years, we did a little better, huh? Not bad, huh?"

You know you can take Mortimer Snerd off the farm—that ventriloquist's dummy—remember Mortimer Snerd? Edgar Bergen's other dummy? And you can sort of put him in the Presidency, and make him a good President, by making sure he wasn't advised to do anything bad, and didn't expect to much of anything good, but somehow the ship of state got to port, and with a captain of that quality, that is quite an achievement, you can be proud of. So the problem here lies not merely in the President's own problems, which, I think, are severe enough by themselves, but this bunch of clowns around him.

Just to give an insight: The poor guy, just to give an insight—I think George H.W.—41—is obsessed, probably, by the fact that when he sat hard on the settlements question in Palestine, that he feels that he lost the election to the Zionist Lobby, which sank his reelection. I haven't talked to George H.W., personally, so I don't know this personally, but I get the reverberations from around him, that is what is on their minds. They obviously are very much concerned about 2004. It's like the guy who wants to get across the chasm desperately enough that he doesn't consider the fact there is no bridge there. They want to get to 2004. So, they are in this fit.

Now, in point of fact, look at his Administration. What controls the Administration? The international mafia, the Russian mafia. Richard Perle—this whole crowd—Wolfowitz, Wurmser, the Wohlstedter crowd, these are the most notorious clowns in America. This is like Satanic nightmare, or something out of some Satanic novel, a flock of vampires, Dracula vampires—and they are sitting on the Administration, actually controlling the policy.

Look at what Jeff Steinberg reported on the question about how this 11 pages, or the 19 or 16 pages, got into the Blair report, which was then recited ritually by Secretary Powell before the Security Council, which was not written by some student—that was not a student's paper—it was written by these clowns as a part of Israeli intelligence! Right-wing Israeli intelligence! The worst clowns imaginable there—wrote this thing, as an extension of the same crowd that wrote the paper, which is called the "Clean Break" paper, calling for the war on Iraq, which Cheney is pushing for, which Cheney issued back over 10 years ago, at the end of the first Bush Administration.

This guy is controlled right now—the Secretary of State is controlled by, the Defense Department from the top is controlled by, the Justice Department is controlled by this bunch of organized-crime people of this particular persuasion, from the top down. And this guy is sitting there in the Presidency controlled by fear—his father's fears, the fear that he will lose the next election, if he doesn't do exactly what they want. That is what the problem is. So therefore, how do you approach this problem?

I said, as I said on the 28th of January, and I have said before: You have to focus on the Presidency of the United States, which is the institution, which should control the President, which should be the eyes and ears, and advice of the President, is chiefly the institutions of the Presidency, primarily, and secondly, the Congress. That's how it should work. You have got to bring that force in there, and get these bums out of there. You've got to have a surgical operation to remove the cancer, as Perle, Wolfowitz, Wurmser, Bolton, so forth, the whole kit and kaboodle—get 'em out of there, and put the people who should be advisers in there. And I think you could probably get out of this mess, and you could probably deliver George W. Bush, leaving office in January of 2004, saying, "Big fellow, I did a pretty good job. They don't have to dump us out." And that is the most you can expect from the guy, and that is all I would want from him, is that. I won't expect anything more.

So, therefore, the problem lies with us, with us. Are we going to act, through parties and other instruments, to effect, especially, the institutions around the Presidency, the institutions of the political parties in the Congress in such a way as to create an environment, which will control this situation, and fast? I believe, seeing what happened this past week in the Security Council proceedings, where the world ganged up against George Bush—not against him personally, but against his policy—and where you have a situation in which Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, may be dumped at any moment by the British institutions. And then George Bush would be sitting out there with nobody to talk to because Blair will have gone out of the United Kingdom.

So therefore, the problem is, rather than say, how can we address this problem, given the way it is, ask, how can we change the problem by creating a different environment, which defines the problem and its solution? We should recognize that the world has seen clearly—despite the Washington Post editorials—the world has seen, and has shown itself that it doesn't want this policy. The world has seen that it wants a different policy. It, itself, wants a different policy. The world will see—will recognize—that what it wants is an economic solution to the present world crisis and to calm things down while we solve these economic problem and stop these monkey shines.

Therefore, we have to realize that the people of the world are waiting for someone to push them into acting out the implications of that recognition. The world has changed! The world is now open to hear fresh ideas. The inevitability of war—the danger of war is there, but the inevitability has been removed, as a myth. This is our opportunity. Get out there and provide leadership—the pressure of leadership on the institutions of the Presidency, the Congress and so forth, on other parts of the world. Let's get some action on the economic issue, and let's recognize this war is a bummer. Let's not do it. Let's focus our energy instead on the economic crisis. Many problems are solved by not focussing too much on what appears to be the apparent problem.

In a consulting capacity years ago, I learned this lesson. When I was brought into a firm as a consultant, I would listen to what was said, and I would listen very carefully for one thing: what the manager of the firm would tell me their problem wasn't, and I always knew immediately what that problem was. Because the reason I was there was because they couldn't solve their own problem. The reason they couldn't solve their own problem, was because they refused to recognize what it was. And that is our problem in the United States.

Question: Two questions, and I hope they inspire the people who listen to us today. Why is it necessary for humanity to build a colony on Mars? Why should we go there and leave Earth? And do Earth and Mars need us, humanity, and are we necessary for the universe, or are we just there?

LaRouche: Well, I'll take the second part first. We are necessary for the universe. That's a l-o-n-g question, implicitly, it's a long answer, so I won't do it fully. I'll just say briefly: We are needed. We are needed. We are here to fix the universe, and I enjoy it. I enjoy the work.

On Mars, specifically, there are several things we need to know for humanity to progress. Apart from the problems we have, we can say that progress in physical science, in particular, depends upon going in three directions: astrophysics, microphysics, and living processes. Now these are essentially different categories of universal principles. They are interrelated, as Riemann would say, multiply connected, but, therefore, science progresses, physical science, in particular, where real progress is made, by saying, where did we go, so far? And when you look at how far we have gone, you'll find a number of problems and questions, which remain unanswered.

And the way science works normally is that people don't go out to make money in science. That's not how you make money. That's not how science progresses. Science progresses because you want to do something, like good entrepreneurship. A good entrepreneur doesn't go into business to make money. He may need money. He may need to make a profit to survive, but he does it because he likes to do it. He does it because he wants to do something useful with his life. He wants to survive and prosper. He wants to pass the benefits along to others so that when he dies the benefits will continue.

The scientist is the same thing. You go into science. You specialize in an area. It make take decades before you actually make a significant breakthrough of your own in a scientific field. Why do you do it then? Because it is your purpose in life to do something like that. To do something useful for humanity, and you've chosen that area to pursue it in. So, naturally, in these areas, you go to the obvious places. You go to what we call the frontiers.

Now we have, actually, four frontiers of human knowledge. Some are the easy, obvious ones—astrophysics: What's out there? Go find out. Microphysics: What's down there? Go find out.

Now, we know already that living processes are different than abiotic processes. You will never get a man out of a collection of spare computer parts. You might get an Al Gore, but not a real man! Therefore, life is a universal principle, which existed before the first thing we can call a living process. It always existed in the universe—life, as a principle. We may not call it life in that form, but it existed as a principle distinct from abiotic processes, and was always multiply-connected as an efficient force with that universe. Fine.

So now we have three simple areas of physical science: life, astrophysics, microphysics. They are all multiply connected. Great fun.

We also have a fourth area: mankind. There is no process in this universe we know, which is capable, except man, of discovering a universal physical principle.

This is a power, this power, which is typified by Plato's dialogues. This power is a unique power in the universe, which defines human nature as distinct from that of puppy dogs and worms—and the Democratic Leadership Council. Therefore, this principle is a physically efficient principle in the universe, which we can demonstrate. The fact that there are 6 billion people, rather than several million, is sufficient to demonstrate this principle is physically very damned efficient. All right, so that is another area of exploration. Thus, what should be our policy?

Well, the United States should have several policies, and the world, as a whole, should have several policies. Number one: basic economic infrastructure. We have to manage this planet. We have to manage the totality of area. We have to manage the deserts, the forests, and everything. We have to create transportation systems. We have to create urban life. We have to generate power and distribute it. We have to manage water. We have to do all the things that are necessary to make this habitable by mankind, and to maintain it in that condition.

You know, we have a problem, a real problem. Do you know where you get your minerals from? As opposed to your Wheaties? Where do you get your minerals from? Well, these minerals are coming up from the inner part of the planet, going to the surface area, which is part of what Vernadsky calls the biosphere. Now there is a certain rate of transmission of some of these minerals into the area of the biosphere. In certain areas, mankind is presently consuming these mineral resources more rapidly than they are being transmitted from the interior of the planet to the biosphere.

Therefore, we have to fix that problem. We have to manage it. The atmosphere was created by living processes. It did not come with the Earth. It was manufactured by the action of living processes, which created the atmosphere, which created water, and so forth; the soils also, all created by living processes. We have to manage that. That is the biosphere. That is the basic economic infrastructure. The preconditions of life, economy, and so forth.

No, that is not the limit of things. We have to explore the universe because we don't live on the planet Earth, we live in the universe, and some day the Sun is going to blow up unless we intervene in the meantime to prevent that from happening, and that is going to be terrible for your future. So, therefore, we are going to have to manage that. We are going to have to get out there, in space. We are going to have to find out what's there. We are going to have to explore areas we have not touched yet, with wide-open eyes, to see whatever there is to be seen, and to solve whatever comes under our noses as something worth investigating.

If you do that, one of the things we will have to do is you will have to go to Mars. Now Mars is very important to us because the Solar System, as you may know, is divided into two large areas outside the Sun. One area of the so-called inner planets have certain characteristics; the other, the outer planets. Both were generated at a time, a long time ago, when the Sun was a fast-rotating star and spun off a plasma around it; this was polarized and heavily irradiated from the Sun itself, and it produced the material of our Periodic Table. It spun this stuff into—like a distilling machine—and gave us the planets, because the material would distribute around the planetary orbit and, then, because of the characteristics of the Keplerian orbit, this material condensed into planets and moons.

That's our system. It is divided into two areas, two great areas, defined by Kepler.

Okay, what's the division? Gauss was the first one to solve the problem. Kepler said there is a missing planet; it has exploded in this area between Mars and Jupiter. We call it the asteroids today. Gauss proved that Kepler was right and had the right calculations for the characteristics of this orbit.

Well! What's going on out there? What happens when we cross the asteroid-belt area, when we go out toward Jupiter? How is the universe going to look to us from out there? What principles? Was there life on Mars? Well, there's pretty strong evidence there was life on Mars, because if there's water on Mars, there was life on Mars.

Other things: What happened to Mars? And then we put up some big radio telescopes and things like that, out further. We begin to investigate the universe at great distances. We discover things we didn't even think—we didn't even know the questions, and we're going to find the answers to some of them. So, what do we do? We say we want to have a science-driver program for human progress. Well, let's take our space program, and let's do the kind of thing that Kennedy was aiming at with his manned Moon landing program. Let's build a program, a science program. We'll concentrate science on this because every area of scientific investigation will be expressed in a space program—by its nature. Everything you would want to know about the universe, or about Earth itself, or everything you think you might be able to do, as man, will be expressed in due course as a process of a space program.

So don't think of a space program as a get-rich scheme for some industrialists. Think of a space program as a university laboratory in the highest degree. A laboratory of all university laboratories, in which all kinds of research are going to be concentrated in a coordinated way to solve every kind of problem that just comes under out noses. What are we going to do? Well, we are going to build a nice orbiting station out there. We are going to get rid of this Shuttle business. We are going to do the proper thing, we should have done a long time ago.

We are going to build a station out there. We are going to go to the Moon. We are going to mine the Moon for materials, including fuel, including helium-3, which is abundant on the Moon, which is a very good fusion-power source. We are going to build large-weight devices on the Moon, where it is easier to get them up, lift it up. We are going to move them from the Moon into a geostationary position around Earth. We are going to assemble the parts coming from the Moon and from Earth together. We are not going to send a spaceship over, only an idiot would do that. Von Braun warned against that years ago. You always send at least three or four, like Columbus did, at that distance. Don't send someone out by their lonesome, send them company! Give them support! How are you going to rescue them if they get into trouble? How are you going to rescue the people you're going to have up there? So send a whole bunch of them out there! You want to get them to Mars? You're not going to get them by gravity or velocity; you're going to be put a power unit in there, probably a fusion-energy power generator, possibly. You're going to accelerate that craft all the way from Earth orbit to Mars orbit, and you are going to get there in a short time. Not a weekend visit—it would be a little longer than that. But we can get there.

And we'll go down from the surface on Mars—we wouldn't want to live on the surface. It's a rather nasty place to live on the surface, but we'd go underneath the surface, and build ourselves a habitat. We'd put a bunch of scientists in there. We would use it as an advance-basing station for explorating beyong Mars into further parts of the Solar System.

So we are looking at the totality of human experience in the universe, approaching it as the concept of a university, a super-university, which is going to produce all kinds of things. It's the place you would go, directly or indirectly, if you've got a question, to get the answers. Much better than the Internet. And we develop that.

So, therefore, we do need man on Mars, not as some kind of gimmick, but in the normal process of the progress of humanity in facing the challenge of the universe and meeting the challenge that faces generations yet to come. It is a matter of ensuring your immortality.