Answering these kinds of questions is not terribly expensive, in the bigger scheme of things. Right now, the U.S. investment in planetary science is less than $1.5 billion a year. Put another way, it is less than 0.05 percent of the federal budget. That includes all the missions: Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, and the New Horizons mission currently en route to distant Pluto. What if we upped that a billion and found life on Mars? It would be an extraordinary investment, costing barely the equivalent of an extra cup of coffee per taxpayer. With a president, a Congress, and a NASA administrator
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