Driving to the Moon

For several years, any time I had trouble falling asleep, I would take a moment to run thought experiments in my head.

One of these experiments involved trying to understand astronomical distances, like how far it is from the Earth to the Moon. We humans are wired to comprehend things close to us, but anything further than a few miles isn’t in our evolutionary wheelhouse. Survival in the short term involves things at the scale of feet and inches, not hundreds of billions of miles.

The Moon is about 240,000 miles from the Earth.

It was probably natural that my mind tried to connect this distance to something familiar to me here on Earth. That thing was the total distance I had driven in my 2000 Toyota Corolla, which I took all over the country with me.

That car had around 240,000 miles before it died, and I probably drove that distance over six or seven years. So, over six or seven years, I had traveled the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

This got me thinking: what if I just drove …