How fast are we moving through space?

According to relativity, there’s no universal frame of reference. But the Big Bang gave us one anyway.

“The slow philosophy is not about doing everything in tortoise mode. It’s less about the speed and more about investing the right amount of time and attention in the problem so you solve it.” -Carl Honore

Most likely, as you’re reading this right now, you’re sitting down, perceiving yourself as stationary. Yet we know — at a cosmic level — we’re not so stationary after all. For one, the Earth rotates on its axis, hurtling us through space at nearly 1700 km/hr for someone on the equator.

That’s not really all that fast, if we switch to thinking about it in terms of kilometers per second instead. The Earth spinning on its axis gives us a speed of just 0.5 km/s, hardly a blip on our radar when you compare it to all our other motions.

The Earth, you see, much like all the planets in our Solar System, orbits the Sun at a much speedier clip. In order to keep us in our stable orbit where we are, we need to move at right around 30 km/s. The inner…