The latter would be daunting if one kept to the 100km/h speed limit.
Driving all day and all night (you'd take turns, of course, with a couple of other losers with no concept of time) you would knock off 2400km a day. After a week a whopping 16,800km ... that's roughly from here to Spain.
So after a year with the speedo locked on 100 and the fuel bill rising to epic proportions, you'd have travelled 876,000km.
Not bad, although you'd have to keep that pace up for the next 49 years to make landfall on Mars. I hope someone out there appreciates this startling stuff because it's taken me a dreadful amount of time to work it all out (I got 12 for School Certificate mathematics in 1969).
Oh ... had I set out in that year for Mars at the open road speed limit I'd still have another eight years to go.
Mind you, had I set out on the MV Agusta motorcycle I was foolishly loaned two years ago I'd have arrived there in 1993.
Yes, Mars is a long way away.
Even the savagely fast speed of light can't make the trip in mere seconds ... it takes three minutes.
However, space is a vacuum, so once you sort of reach a rapid velocity your vehicle will maintain it. A sort of cosmic cruise control.
Scientists and the rocket propulsion chaps have worked out that once blasting out of earth's orbit and on to the correct trajectory for Mars (you don't aim at the red spot and hold the steering wheel firmly) it would take between 220 days and 250 days.
That's just to get there.
Then, after spending three fruitless days searching for evidence of water, life and whatever you have to get home again ... another eights months or so.
That is some journey, and many would ask "who'd be bothered?"
Well I've heard about six chaps who would.
Three Russians, two Europeans and a bloke from China walked into a big tin shed (this is no joke) back in June of 2010 and they stayed there for 500 days.
The "mission" was tagged Mars 500. They didn't see the sun or the dark of the night for 500 days. They took no phone calls from people with Indian accents seeking details about their computer accounts. No doorknockers who greet occupants by telling them what a wonderful day God had given them and would they like to learn more.
No inane, thumping bass music to accompany barking bloody dogs.
It was all about acclimatising to the concept of travelling to Mars, and by accounts it wall went very well. Unlike the initial "mission" a year or so back which collapsed after just three days ... one of the Russian boys allegedly tried to kiss the Canadian woman scientist.
So lads only this time (that was one lesson learned although I think we could have all recognised that sort of "issue" would have arisen).
These six voyagers to nowhere looked pale and slightly underweight when they emerged on November 4, but said the experience had been powerful and valuable to mankind's quest to reach Mars.
And the money wasn't bad either.
They each got about $128,000 ... that's good money for not actually going anywhere and coming back again.
I wonder what they talked about?
I wonder what they did after the boredom kicked in on the 11th day?
I wonder where they stored all the toilet paper?
But more than anything, I wonder if they wondered about what scientists are now predicting for space travel in two decades time ... which is also about the time a Mars journey is expected to take place.
Startling new technology they believe will produce equally startling new forms of power and motivation and thrust.
The sort of pace which will get a ship to Mars and back in just 10 or 11 weeks.
Exciting news, but probably not for the boys in the Mars 500 club.
"Ten or eleven weeks? We could have watched the Rugby World Cup after all."
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.
