How fast can I go sitting in my chair?

How fast would you say you are moving right now? Personally, I would say sitting in my computer chairing that I am traveling at about zero miles an hour. Most people would probably answer about the same. Maybe a few viewings this on their phones in a car might say somewhere between 0 and 100 mph. At the very highest a person on a plane would say they are moving around 600 mph.

Now if you have ever been in a bullet train you know what 300 mph looks like. The world outside the window fly's by at such a high speed you can’t even focus on anything even slightly close to the train before it disappears out of view. You have a good point of reference, so you can really see how fast your moving compared to the world around you. When you travel on a plane you don’t ever really see how fast your moving since you’re so high up you don't have a good point of reference. If you didn't know you were traveling at 600 mph in a plane, then to you it would seem like the car ride to the airport you were moving faster than in the plane. So how fast you feel you are going is all based around what kind of points of reference are around you and how you can relate to them. If you have no points of reference, then you would have no idea how fast you’re really going. Could you be traveling at a huge speed right now and not know it?

In reality we are all moving at such ridiculously high speeds that they are almost inconceivable. Since we have no point of reference for the speeds we are traveling at to us it seems like we are just sitting in a chair traveling exactly nowhere. Let's look at how fast we are moving and not even realize it.

We all know the earth is spinning both on its axis and around the sun. Because of this we have both night and day as well as the seasons depending on where the sun is on its twirling trip around the sun. So, let’s start by looking at how fast the earth is spinning on its axis.

The earth spins at ~1,040 mph at the equator. If you live halfway from the equator to the poles the earth is spinning around 700 to 900 mph there and it drops off the closer, you get to the poles. So, depending on where you live on the earth you could be traveling up to 1,040 mph and never even realize it. That’s fast but we are going a lot faster than that…

Next let’s look at how fast the earth spins around the sun. It takes 12 months for the earth to travel around the sun as we all know. That seems like a long time, so we can’t be moving too quickly around the sun. Imagine how fast you travel down the freeway and then make it a 1000 times faster. That's how fast we are traveling around the sun. We are traveling around the sun at 67,000 mph. Think of it this way; you could travel from L.A. to New York city in little bit over 2 minutes at 67,000 mph. Even this speed alone is nearly impossible to comprehend but we are not close to done yet.

Now we have to look at our solar system as a whole in relation to the Milky Way. Our entire galaxy is spinning around just as our solar system is. It takes the sun are 225 million years to make an orbit around the galactic core of our galaxy. Again this a really long time so we can be moving too quickly right? In order to make this trip our solar system is traveling at around 483,000 mph around the core. So even if you were not spinning around the earth and the earth wasn't spinning around the sun you would still be traveling at around a half million miles an hour. If you were flying around the earth at that speed you would circle the entire earth about 19.32 times in an hour. And yet again we are not done yet...

Finally we come to the last step we need to look at. From what we can observe the entire universe appears to be expanding out from where the Big Bang took place. Every single galaxy is traveling away from the Big Bang at different speeds but thanks to our ability to detect and track gamma ray emissions from other galaxy's we can determine that our entire galaxy is traveling through space at around 1.3 million miles per hour. That's right, our entire galaxy is flying through space at over a million miles an hour. That is equal to traveling around the entire earth 52 times an hour. Almost once every single minute.!

So every single moment of our lives we are whipping across the universe at over 1.3 million miles an hour (depending on which direction we are spinning at a given point in time it might be less or more) Our molecules are screaming across the vastness of space at these speeds and we just don’t feel or see it because we have no point of reference and because we are traveling all together through a vacuum so there are no gravitational force (or G-Force) at play on us so we don’t feel it. So, to answer my posts initial question: to me my computer chair is going zero miles an hour but to the universe it's going about 1.3 million miles an hour. Too bad I can't see my computer chair from the universes perspective, it would make just sitting in it a lot more intense.