so like 12.5 million a year? what an incredible self-own.

aside from that, this number is meaningless without context: how much do other fields of research get?

Don't tell him how much money was invested into CERN over the same timespan to conduct experiments with highly uncertain outcomes. Or into gravitational wave detection. It wasn't certain that those waves even exist until the first measurement decades into the program.

12.5 million a year for a hundred people seems reasonable? 125k per person per year. GP still said "a few hundred" - two hundred would drop that value to 62.5k per person