MIT faculty mission-to-Mars budget argument (Philadelphia alumni event, ~1994)

Tom recounts an MIT colleague's argument that the US could afford a Mars program because Americans spend more annually on potato chips. Tom's rebuttal: if you polled Americans, they'd choose the chips.

I was at an alumni thing in Philadelphia once, about twenty-five years ago. We had a young faculty member — she's not so young anymore, she's close to tenure now, very distinguished career. She was talking about the mission to Mars. She was saying, we can afford this — we spend as much money on potato chips each year as we do on a program of about two to three billion dollars a year, she was claiming, to go to Mars over the next twenty years. Forty billion dollars. First of all I don't think it'll be two billion a year, I think it would be twenty billion a year — four hundred billion. But let's take her two billion. I leaned over to the person next to me, I said, if you did a poll of all the people in America, would they be willing to give up their potato chips for a trip to Mars? I think I know how that vote would come out. I think it comes out every day in the grocery store.