About 270,000,000,000,000 miles away is the edge of the observable universe.
It will take you 480,000,000,000,000 years to get there, or 35 million times the age of the universe.
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It will be a dangerous trip. We are not worried about space stuff, but driving itself is dangerous. Middle-aged drivers in the US suffer about one fatal crash for every 100 million miles they drive. Most drivers wouldn't travel past the asteroid belt if a highway was built out of the solar system. Truck drivers have a lower crash rate than other drivers, but they are not likely to reach Jupiter.
The odds of a driver traveling 46 billion light-years without a crash are about one in 15. The chance of a monkey with a typewriter typing out the entire Library of Congress is roughly the same as it is of a monkey. One of those alarms that warns you if you drift out of your lane is something you will want.
A lot of fuel is needed for the trip. It would take a moon-sized sphere of gasoline to get to the edge of the universe. 17 cents per mile is equivalent to the cost of gas and snacks on a road trip. It would take a container of engine oil to hold 30 quintillion oil changes. An old piece of advice says that you need to change your oil every 3000 miles, but most car experts agree that is not true.
It would take 1017 tons of snacks. If there are lots of rest areas, your trunk is going to be full.
The scenery won't change much on the long drive. Most of the stars are going to burn out before you get to the end of the universe. I suggest that you plan a route that will take you past the stars. After 30 billion years, it will have cooled to a comfortable room temperature. The planet it currently has will probably be eaten by the time you get there.
You will need a new source of entertainment once the stars are gone. It won't last you to the edge of the solar system if you bring every audiobook and every episode of every show.
The average person has about 150 social relationships. Around 100 billion are the total number of humans who have ever existed. A 1017-year road trip would be enough to replay the lives of every one of those people in real time, in a sort of unedited documentary, and then rewatch every single one of those documentaries 150 times, each time with a different commentary track by the 150 people who knew the
You would have plenty of time to watch the entire project 100 times, since you would be less than 1 percent of the way to the edge of the universe.
If you reach the edge of the observable universe, you can drive back home for another 1017 years, but there won't be any Earth to return to.
The edge of the observable universe isn't the edge of the actual universe It is the farthest we are able to see because there has not been enough time for light to reach us. There is no reason to believe that the space ends at that point. It could go on forever. The edge of space is not the edge of the observable universe. It is not possible to know what you will find when you cross it.
Extra snacks are a must.
Adapted from the book "What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions"
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