A Nice Long Walk

If the Sun were the size of a basketball...

Setting aside the quote above for the moment--it's not related to this question--how long would it take to walk from the Earth to the Moon? Assuming a suitable road, space suit, and a sustainable pace with breaks for eating and sleeping, of course.

It works out to about 30 years. Not bad at all.

How long would it take to walk to the Sun?

You'd need a good deal more sophisticated suit, but if you had one, and could spare the time... about 12,000 years.  That actually surprises me in how relatively short it is given the 93 million mile distance.  12,000 ago is just about the time the first humans migrated over the Bering ice bridge to North America.  If they hadn't stopped to found the Maya, Inca, and other Native American cultures, they could have made it to the Sun by now.

This is the kind of thing I figure out in my head to put myself to sleep at night.

You can do this one. If the Sun were the size of a basketball... how far away from it would Saturn be? :)  If that's too easy by itself, work out all the planets... and what common items they would be the size of... You can do it without a calculator.

:) - Mark