Speed of our movement

ronbyrne2005

Is'nt it amazing that relative to the rest universe(outside of the local group of galaxies) we are moving a over a million miles an hour! Even the arms of our spiral galaxy move at what, around 100,000 km/hr?

mike65

Im just amazed we are travelling round the sun at about 60,000mph.

Mike.

DublinWriter

Amazinger still, considering it takes at least 2 hours to traverse the M50 on a wet Monday afternoon.

As Einstein said, it's all relative.

aidan_dunne

Well, reading this thread I just couldn't resist mentioning this little gem from Eric Idle who I think summed it all up best when he sang..........


Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.

We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

CiDeRmAn

Makes one wonder what these speeds do to the local time experienced by different locations, given the relative differences in speed and acceleration, no fixed frames of reference, would play hell with your Sky+ box!
"Will you record tomorrows ep of Battlestar Galactica?, Sorry mate, due to the curvature of the universe and the speed we are going, i'm afraid it was on yesterday, and in reverse!"

caffrey

how did we end up on this rock? by chance of course!! the fact that we are here in what seems to be a very unpopulated universe is good defense for the fact that according to quantum physics if t->infinity and you keep running at a wall the chance that you will go through becomes likely.

Its all random chance.

CiDeRmAn

Yup, like that experiment where they fire particles at a thin sliver of material and instead of the particles behaving nice and ordered and stop dead, some drift on through, like its not there. I guess its all quantum!
But if you go in for a statistical view of it all, the fact that this particular universe has the just right conditions for our type of life suggests a continuum of universes with every permutation, either co-existing in a metaverse or in some sort of series, each bang is preceeded by a crunch, resetting the various basic values, like Pi, the constants of the elementary forces of nature, giving rise to any number of viable and non-viable universes, some of which may be familiar, some not. Read Stephen Baxters Raft, it was his first novel and probably his best and is about a group of humans trying to survive a universe where gravity isn't what we remember it to be.

Flukey

aidan_dunne wrote:

Well, reading this thread I just couldn't resist mentioning this little gem from Eric Idle who I think summed it all up best when he sang..........

Before I had even scrolled down as far as your post, I was thinking of putting that in myself.