The Speed of Stillness
How fast can you travel without moving? Pretty dang fast, it turns out.
How fast can you travel without moving a muscle? Faster than you probably think... If you’d humor me, go ahead and sit tight and upright in a nearby chair, clutch the sides with your hands as hard as you possibly can and pull yourself downward, squeeze shut your eyes, furrow your brow, and imagine careening through the sky on your spaceship at, sayspace at impossible speeds in strange, knotty paths. What would it feel like to fly
It turns out to be faster than you might think. mor me, if you will. Stand up and walk three steps in any one direction before returning to your seat. Using your shoe size, try to estimate with reasonable accuracy how far you think you traveled over the course your three steps and back. Most people settle somewhere between 8–10 feet. Unfortunately, they’re off by a margin of a few hundred thousand miles.
It’s also true that you’re not seated anymore in the same place you were when you began reading this either. You could’ve skipped my request to walk altogether (and probably did!), stayed seated, and you still wouldn’t be in the same place you were when you began reading. In fact, if we’re talking about your true position in actual space, then you will never return to the same place in space you started.
No, I’m not pitching my plot of the Orwellian sequel to Vivarium I’ve been hacking out a screenplay for or the “threequel” to Wandering Earth, and I don’t mean “You’re not the same person you were when you started the trip” either (although that’s truer than you might realize—upcoming article). I mean that you are, physically, in as literal a sense of the word as possible, not in the same place/position/location you were when you began reading this.
That’s because nothing you see around you is stationary. Everyone and everything on Earth’s surface is spinning around and around at 1,000 miles per hour, or 16 miles every second. This speed has been confirmed in many ways. We don’t notice this motion because everything on Earth is spinning at the exact same speed as we are, and the sky above us appears to us to rotate in perfect lockstep as well. This creates the perfect and very convincing illusion we are all motionless when we are, truly, anything but.
Now, some of you may say:
“But what if we wait exactly one day — one full rotation of the Earth? Then I’ll be back at my original position! ”
Smart thinking but it’s not quite that simple. Remember that the Earth itself is orbiting the sun at 67,000 miles per hour (that’s 19 miles per second). So even when the Earth has rotated you back to where you started, relative to the Earth, the Earth is no longer where it used to be and, therefore, neither are you.
“Ah, but orbits are just circular rotations themselves, so all we have to do is wait exactly one year and one day! Then we’ll have completed one full orbit and one full day rotation and should be exactly back to our original spot again.
Clever thinking, but the the sun isn’t stationary, either. We tend to think about it that way, but the sun is actually moving through the Milky Way Galaxy at 2,383 mile per hour (140 miles per second). In fact, everything is hurtling through space at ridiculous speeds… and not in straight lines, either, but knotty, twisting and intersecting paths.
We’re used to seeing planets orbit the sun in a circles on a 2D plane or sheet of paper but realize that this is only one perspective; one which conveniently shows all planets sitting on concentric rings like an onion slice (they are rarely aligned like that in reality) and leaves out the fact the entire set of rings itself is rotating and moving through space. The true picture is much more complicated:
Sia’s “Floating Through Space” (Jim Ouma mix)
So that’s our solar system… every second, we rotate on Earth 18.5 miles, we continue our orbit around the sun another 1,116 miles, and the sun continues its journey through the milky way another 143 miles. But wait… the Milky Way galaxy is rotating around inside the Virgo cluster of galaxies at 130 miles per second. And the Virgo cluster itself is rotating around inside the Laniakea supercluster at 250 miles per second.
And hey, you guessed it… the Laniakea supercluster, and every other cluster we can see, in fact, is moving 278 miles per second toward a mysterious, supermassive body called The Great Attractor, which is so massive that everything in our observable universe seems to be getting pulled in its direction.
Shut up and calculate!
Although one would have to take into account the angular direction of momentum each individual path, for simplicity’s sake, let’s just total all that movement together in terms of mps (miles per second):
- Earth moves 18.5 mps around the Sun
- Sun moves 143 mps through the Milky Way
- The Milky Way moves through the Virgo cluster at 250 mps
- Virgo cluster moves through the Laniakea supercluster at 16,667 mps
Leaving aside the slow, steady pull of the Great Attractor on Laniakea and other clustesrs, which would increase this figure by 150 fold, we still end up with a result of 17,079 miles of total movement every second. Every second. So that place in space you were sitting in when you started reading this is long gone by now.
What would this velocity increase to if we did include our movement toward The Great Attractor? It’s
But wait, it gets worse — Einstein’s general relativity tells us that even if things were more or less stationary, we’d still have a hard time saying where any one thing really is because positions in space are more nebulous (pun intended) than we tend to think of them. The more precise you want to get in where something’s located, the more Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle kicks in and begins to obfuscate the other measurements you care about, like velocioty. At nature’s finest scale, the quanum level, it’s hard to say where anything is from an aboslute kind of perspective. without comparing it to where something else is. There’s really no such thing as an absolute position because there’s no such thing as absolute space.
In conclusion, Sia didn’t realize how right she was when recording “Floating Through Space.” Take her advice, though, and celebrate the fact that at the end of each day, after the impossibly far distances and unfathomably fast speeds we were all hurtled along,
At the end of each day, try to think about impossibly far, today, and unfathomably fast this small, blue ball in the middle of the Milky Way really traveled, with all of us on its back like cosmic hitchhikers. Celebrate the miracle that allows us to be wholly unaware of this immense amount of movement and enjoy a more pleasant-feeling, “stationary” life on Earth.
