It's even worse than that. The earth is 93 million miles from the sun (1 AU), so when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun it's at least 180 million miles a

It's even worse than that. The earth is 93 million miles from the sun (1 AU), so when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun it's at least 180 million miles away, with the sun in the way. The numbers expressed by GP for how far Earth is from Mars is actually referring to how far Earth's orbit is from Mars' orbit, not the distance of the planets themselves at various positions in their orbits.