Can You Imagine?

I recently visited the Bigfoot Museum in Felton, California, and my mind is not totally recovered from the experience. I have no idea whether or not Bigfoot is real, but I can tell you that there are an awful lot of very dense forests out there that have not been totally explored. There are also a lot of things in space that remain unexplored. One recent effort to explore space was the launching of Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster with a starman mannequin at the wheel.

A website called Time Traveller Wiki recently reported:

The red electric car and its spacesuit-clad mannequin driver, which launched on the maiden mission of SpaceX’s huge Falcon Heavy rocket in February, have made it beyond the orbit of Mars, company representatives said Friday night (Nov. 2).

“Starman’s current location. Next stop, the restaurant at the end of the universe,” SpaceX posted on Twitter Friday, along with an orbit diagram.

The article continues:

Musk has said that he launched the Roadster and Starman because the duo is a lot more fun than the typical inert-mass dummy payload (pun intended; sorry). Launching a satellite or other valuable spacecraft wasn’t an option, given the risks inherent in maiden flights. (Musk also runs Tesla, so publicity was probably a factor as well.)

Starman and his ride — which once belonged to Musk — won’t stay beyond Mars forever. As you can see in the diagram, the pair will loop back on their heliocentric orbit, eventually coming about as close to the sun as Earth does. 

The Roadster and Starman will come within a few hundred thousand kilometers of our planet in 2091, according to an orbit-modeling study. The authors of that study determined that the car will slam into either Venus or Earth, likely within the next few tens of millions of years. They give the space car a 6 percent chance of hitting Earth in the next 1 million years, and a 2.5 percent chance of smacking Venus in that span.

If you follow the link to the website, you can track the journey of the Roadstar and Starman as they traverse the universe.

My final thought on this is to wonder if there is life on Mars, what is the average Martian thinking when he looks up and sees a Tesla and a driver going by  his planet. I have no idea if there is life on Mars, but if there is, can you imagine their surprise when they see a Tesla go by?