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 the car, nonstop? I figured if we had a straight “road” that went all the way to the moon, and you could “drive” 70 miles per hour on this road, you could cover 840 miles if you drove 12 hours. Then, someone else could take over while you slept, and the two of you could collectively manage 1,680 miles each day.

Now, I know this isn’t a very realistic thought experiment. Already, you’re thinking: come on, nobody can drive that much, and besides, covering that much distance would also require lots of maintenance for your car (and for your bodies). All of this is true, but none of that matters: I get a sense of how far it is, and that’s the point.

After 143 days of doing this, or a little under five months, we would reach our destination.

Now, every time I look at the moon in the sky, I have a palpable sense of how far it is. I feel a certain connectivity to the Moon that might not otherwise be there.

My next “experiment” usually involves scaling up a lot, and trying to think about how far it is to the sun. Assuming I was still awake at this point, I need to do a little bit of clumsy math in my head: the sun is about 93 million miles away from earth, and of course I know this because of that They Might Be Giants song:

Given that the moon is 240,000 miles, and I know how far that is—seven years of driving for me, or 147 days of nonstop driving at 70 MPH—I just need to think of the distance to the sun in terms of distances to the moon.

240,000 is pretty much 250,000 if you’re trying to understand the scale of something this big. I just want to get a sense of the size, not get lost in relatively unimportant number chasing, so I use the 250,000 figure (four of them makes a million miles). If I can keep envisioning that initial drive to the moon, five months of driving at 70 miles per hour, I can start to see what it takes to get to the sun.

It takes more than a year to go a million miles, so I can already see that it’s going to end up being a little over a century before we arrive at the Sun. Yikes.

Still, this can help give me a sense of how very far away the Sun is, and how (relatively) close the moon is by comparison.

Do you ever try thinking about stuff like this when you’re trying to fall asleep? Alternatively, do you ever try to wrap your head around things we humans aren’t really wired to understand, like longer time scales? Let me know in the comments!

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