The edge of the evident world is about 270,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. If you drive at a consistent 65 miles per hour, it will take you 480,000,000,000,000,000— that’s 4. 8 × 10 ¹⁷— years to get there, or 35 million times the existing age of the universe.
This will certainly be a dangerous road journey. Due to the fact that of area stuff— we’re not stressing concerning all that— yet because driving itself is rather dangerous, I do not suggest. In the United States, the average middle-aged chauffeur experiences about one fatal crash per 100 million miles driven.
If someone constructed a freeway out of the solar system, the majority of vehicle drivers would not make it past the asteroid belt. Vehicle chauffeurs, who are made use of to driving long distances on highways, have a lower per-mile collision price than various other vehicle drivers, but they would still be not likely to get to Jupiter. Based on national crash prices, the odds of a vehicle driver traveling 46 billion light-years without a crash would be about 1 in 10 ¹⁰ ^ ¹⁵.
That’s about the same as the probability of an ape with a typewriter typing out the entire Library of Congress, without typos, 50 times in a row. You’ll desire a self-driving automobile, or at least one with one of those alarms that warns you if you wander out of your lane.
The trip would take a lot of gas. At 33 miles per gallon, it would take a moon-size sphere of fuel to get to the edge of the universe. ( As of 2021, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has traveled about 5 billion miles on a budget plan of concerning$850 million, which exercises to 17 cents per mile— quite similar to the expense of gas as well as treats on a journey. ) You would certainly run through regarding 30 quintillion oil adjustments, requiring a container of engine oil the volume of the Arctic Ocean.
(An old piece of guidance states that you require to alter your oil every 3,000 miles, however a lot of car professionals concur that’s a myth— contemporary fuel engines can conveniently go 2 or three times that distance between modifications. )You ‘d likewise need 10 ¹⁷ tons of snacks. Hopefully, there are a lot of intergalactic remainder locations, or your trunk is mosting likely to be rather full. It’s mosting likely to be a very long drive, and also the views won’t change a lot at all. A lot of the noticeable celebrities willstress out before you also leave the Milky Way galaxy.
If you want to attempt touching a room-temperature celebrity, I suggest intending a path that takes you past Kepler-1606. It’s 2,800 light-years away, so when you drive past it after 30 billion years, it will have cooled down to a comfortable space temperature. It currently has a world, although that will probably have been devoured by the time you obtain there. Once the stars have worn out, you’ll have to locate a brand-new resource of enjoyment. Also if you bring every audiobook ever before videotaped as well as every episode of every podcast, that will not even last you to the edge of the solar system. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar notoriously suggested that the ordinary human keeps regarding 150 social partnerships. The complete number of people that have ever before lived is someplace north of 100 billion. A 10 ¹⁷-year journey would certainly be long enough to replay
the lives of each of those individuals in real time— in a kind of unedited documentary— and after that rewatch every one of those documentaries 150 times, each time with a different commentary track by the 150 people that understood the subject best. By the time you had actually finished enjoying this complete docudrama of human point of view, you would certainly still be much less than 1 percent of the method to the side of deep space, so you would certainly have plenty of time to rewatch the entire project— each human life with all 150 discourse tracks— 100 times before you finally arrived.
Once you reached the edge of the observable world, you can spend one more 4. 8 × 10 ¹⁷ years driving back home, yet given that there will not be any Earth to return to— just black holes and also the frozen husks of celebrities will certainly remain— you might also keep going. As far as we understand, the side of the evident cosmos isn’t the side of the actual universe. It’s just the farthest that we’re able to see, due to the fact that there hasn’t been time for light to reach us from any type of farther parts of space.
There’s no factor to assume that space itself ends at that specific factor, however we do not understand how much farther it goes. It could simply proceed for life. The side of the observable cosmos isn’t the side of area, simply the edge of the map. There’s no chance to be sure what you’ll find when you cross it. Be certain to load additional snacks. Adapted from»What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions,»released by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Random House LLC.
