What is the combined motion of everything in the universe? How does all of that influence us? Are we just going around in circles, or is there something more? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

Correction to a comment made in the episode: there are roughly pi times ten million seconds in a year, not one million!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT (AUTO-GENERATED)

When nature first, the world's foundation laid. She called a council how it might be made. Motion was first, who had a subtle wit, and then came life and form and matter fit. That is the opening stanza in a poem by Margaret Cavendish, a mid 1600 philosopher, pioneer of social sciences, poet, as you've realized, all around genius, the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society. And she understood something about the nature of motion.

Motion defines our lives. Everything we see, everything we experience is all in motion even if we become perfectly still, Slowing our breath, controlling our heartbeat, entering a state of perfect meditative awareness, there is still motion. Take a moment with me, just a brief one, to pause, to imagine yourself motionless so you can become aware of the incessant restlessness of the universe around you. The beating of our hearts. The buzzing electrical and chemical signals in our neurons.

The flow of blood through capillaries, veins, and arteries. The grinding of our food in our digestive tract. The storage, transformation, and release of energy within our cells. The exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in our lungs. The microscopic creatures crawling along our skin.

I'm trying not to think about that one too much. The bombardment of cosmic rays, the exchanging of gluons within every atomic nucleus, the balance of radiation absorbed and emitted by our bodies. Motion doesn't just define our lives. It defines our universe. What is existence except for a constant interplay of energies as mediated by motion?

This isn't just true at microscopic scales either. In life, you're constantly moving. You you walk or drive or bike or take a train to work. You you pace around the house. You head back to the kitchen for a snack.

You hop on a flight to visit an old friend. You wake up in the middle of the night to pee. On average, the typical human will move somewhere between 5080,000 kilometers in their entire lifetime. That's enough to circumnavigate the globe 1 or 2 entire times. And, obviously, if you're a jet setting, content hopping superstar, it's a lot more than that, but the average you know, most people are not jet setting, content hopping superstars.

They're much more sedentary than that. But even that the average still comes up to 1 or 2 times around the globe, that's a lot. Way more than I thought it would before I looked that number up. But even if you were not to move, if you were to stay perfectly still for your entire life negating that 50 to 80,000 kilometers on average, bringing that average down for the rest of us, even if you were to remain perfectly motionless, there wouldn't just be the motions of everything microscopic in and around you. If you were to stay as still as a stone for the eternity of your life, you cannot help but move.

Why? Because we exist on a planet and the planet is in orbit around a star and the star is a member of a galaxy and that galaxy is drifting through the cosmos. So to find out how far we move in our lives, let's start small and work our way up. First up, we have the rotation of the earth. In case you didn't get the memo by now, the reason that the sun rises in the east every morning and sets in the west every evening, the reason that the stars wheel about in the heavens every night is due to the rotation of the earth.

Now the Earth is a mostly solid ball of mostly rock, and so it spins with constant, what we call, angular speed. That means every position on the Earth sweeps out the same angle on a circle in the same amount of time. In other words, no matter where you are in the globe, you are going to spin around 360 degrees in 24 hours. But we're not so concerned with angular motion. We're concerned with something we call linear speed, which is different on different parts of the globe.

If you were to stand at the geographic north or south pole, your angular speed would still be 360 degrees in 24 hours, because it's kind of the definition of a day, but your linear motion would be 0. You would just be standing there spinning around and around without actually going anywhere, which would be fun, I'm sure, but but not very useful. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the equator, which has the greatest linear speed for people standing right in the equator to cover that 360 degrees in 24 hours. You have to travel that entire circle in the circumference of the earth, and that comes out to around 1,600 kilometers per hour, which is fast, which is why we try to launch satellites from as close to the equator as possible to give them a helping hand in reaching escape velocity or orbital velocity. You get a 1600 kilometer per hour boost when you do that.

Now most humans don't live at the equator. So if we want to get, some sense of what the average human will travel, we have to pick a rough number to go with here, and as you will see as we go, precision doesn't really matter. So let's go ahead and say, 1500 kilometers per hour. 1,500 kilometers per hour is the average speed of people as the Earth spins. And if we assume that the average human life is, I don't know, 80 years, let's not dig into that too deeply because that's kinda morbid, that gives us around 700000 hours to play with, which again, don't think about that too much.

Putting that all together, 700000 hours times 1500 kilometers per hour gives us a grand total of around and, again, I'm being very rough with these numbers because as you will see, it won't matter. Around a 1000000000 kilometers just because of the rotation of the earth. That that's really puts our travel on the earth in perspective, doesn't it? All the walking, all the biking, all the driving, all the flying you do in your entire life, which is a lot. 50 to 80000 kilometers on average is a rounding error compared to your motion just from the rotation of the earth itself.

You get a 1000000000 kilometers of travel just from sitting on your butt all day and letting the Earth spin. 1000000000 kilometers. This is crazy. But we're just getting warmed up because in addition to its rotation, the earth also orbits around the sun, which you have to thank for the seasons. Now once we get up to these kinds of numbers with orbital velocities, we're going to have to switch units because, spoiler alert, things are get so fast that kilometers per hour is going to get excessively cumbersome.

So we're going to have to switch to kilometers per second. And keep in mind, there are 3,600 seconds in an hour, so you can see how this shortens things up a bit. Now the speed of the Earth in its orbit changes. The Earth follows any ellipse around the sun. And when the Earth is closer to the sun in that elliptical path, it's going a little bit faster than when it's at the far end of the ellipse.

But we can average around that. After all, we're gonna take 80 trips around the sun. We're gonna smooth all that out. And on average, the earth travels about 30 kilometers per second, which doesn't sound like that big of a number, but remember we've switched units to make things easier. And when you add that up over a year and, by the way, a handy thing I learned, I don't know, at some point in my education.

If you ever need to know how many seconds are in a year, which may come up more or less often depending on your profession and social circumstances, it's like, 3.16 times 10 to the 6 seconds per year. That's 3.16000000 seconds per year, which is around pi. Pi is 3.14. So you just remember a 1000000 pies in a year. I don't know why.

That has nothing to do with the topic of today's episode, but it's it's just a neat little random fact. Anyway, pie a 1000000 pies in a year times 30 kilometers per second, and you get around a 1000000000 kilometers a year. That means in your lifetime, the orbit of the Earth will carry you around 80,000,000,000 kilometers. And just like your motion on the surface of the Earth, not counting any astronauts who happen to be listening, was a rounding error compared to the motion due to the rotation of the Earth, the orbit of the Earth totally swamps it. The rotation of the Earth carries you 1,000,000,000 kilometers.

Well, that's a rounding error compared to the orbital motion, which is 80,000,000,000. Eighty minus 1 is still basically 80, at least if you're an astronomer. Eighty,000,000,000 kilometers of travel and we haven't even left the solar system. So let's leave the solar system. Our entire solar system is moving through the Milky Way Galaxy.

Mostly in orbit around the center, there's a little bit of extra motion, a little upy downy, wavy motion that our solar system does. There's also a little bit of in out through general gravitational interactions with with stars in our environment, but we don't really need to care about that. That's a very very small effect. On average, we are orbiting around the center with a speed of around 230 kilometers per second. That means it takes us about 230000000 years to make one orbit around the center of the Milky Way.

That is one what we call a galactic year. Just like a year is one orbit of the Earth around the Sun, one galactic year is one orbit of the Sun around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. To put some processes on Earth in perspective, life appeared on Earth about 17 galactic years ago, and in about 25 galactic years, our Sun will die as a planetary nebula. Anyway, over your lifetime, you will barely move on galactic scales, but on human scales, it's a decently big number. 230 kilometers per second times 80 years gives us around 600,000,000,000 kilometers.

600,000,000,000 kilometers. The entire motion of the Earth's orbit around the sun is about 10% of the motion of the sun around the Milky Way's center. We jumped from 50 to 80,000 kilometers for us moving on the surface of the Earth to about a 1000000000 kilometers for the Earth spinning on its axis to about 80,000,000,000 kilometers to travel around the sun. Now we're we're at 600,000,000,000 kilometers for the sun traveling around the Milky Way's center. If we're just talking in broad strokes and in astronomy, that's usually all we get, then all that really matters is the orbital motion of the sun around the continent hopping jetsetters among you.

The most important number here is the total orbit of the sun around the center of the Milky Way, which in galactic terms, in 80 years, barely even registers as movement, but that's still 600,000,000,000 kilometers. It just shows how big the galaxy is. And we're not done. We're not done. You see, our galaxy is in motion too.

Like I said, everything is in motion from the subatomic to the cosmologic. Everything is in motion in our universe. Now there's motion due to expansion. We know that the universe is getting bigger every single day, but that's not really the kind of motion we're interested in because that's due to the expansion of space itself. And from our perspective, it looks like all the galaxies in the universe, well, most of the galaxies in the universe are flying away from us, like we said something offensive.

But that's true for any perspective in an expanding universe. You pick any random galaxy in the universe, you travel to that, and from that galaxy's perspective, it looks like all galaxies are moving away from it because that is not motion within space time. It is expansion of space itself. So we care here about motion within space time, so we don't get to use the expansion of the universe to include in our calculations of motion. But even when you take that away, and astronomers have this wonderful you know how much I love jargon.

I just did an episode about weird jargon. Somehow this word didn't make it in. If you take the motion of galaxies and there's the general expansion, All galaxies on average are getting farther away from all other galaxies. If you subtract that out, there is still motion on top of that. You know, the galaxy's expanding away from each other, but going a little bit left because of random gravitational interactions.

Going a little right, a little bit up and down. That extra little motion on top of the expansion, we call peculiar velocity because of reasons. Anyway, we're moving. We have some peculiar velocity, some strange speed on top of the expansion of the universe, and that is what we care about. This is difficult to measure precisely because we can only do this in reference to other galaxies.

Like, we're here in the Milky Way, and it's not like there's some accelerometer or speedometer sitting in near Sagittarius a star, and we can just look at it and say, oh, man. We're really booking it. We can only tell our own motion by looking at it compared to the galaxies around us, and it's really hard, as you might imagine, to disentangle the motion of the other galaxies versus the motion of our own galaxy. Like, if we see Andromeda moving towards us, which it is, we say, well, how much is Andromeda moving towards us, and how much is us moving towards Andromeda? A little bit hard to calculate.

Anyway, on average, it's around a 100 kilometers per second, which notice, this is the first time things have shifted. When we've gone from planetary scales to solar system scales to galactic scales, we've been going up and up and up in speed. But now when we're going to extra galactic scales, it's still fast. A 100 kilometers per second is still really fast. But it's not faster than the orbital motion of the sun around the center of the Milky Way.

That was all the way up at 230 kilometers per second. There's a shift here because now we are entering galactic and extra galactic scales, and the speeds here, the scales here are roughly the same. It's the same with distances. Like our Milky Way galaxy is a 100000 light years across, and the distance to the nearest galaxy, Andromeda, major galaxy, is is 2 and a half 1000000. Yeah.

That's bigger. That that's a lot bigger, but not, like, extraordinarily bigger. You know, the the difference between the size of the solar system and the size of the Milky Way is incomprehensible. Well, Andromeda is just 25 times bigger or more distant than the width of the Milky Way. Like, the numbers here are are still bigger, but it it there's this interesting transition once you enter cosmological scales.

Anyway, 100 kilometers per second roughly is our motion, and this motion is in the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy. We're going to collide in about 5000000000 years. It there'll be plenty of fireworks. If you're around, make sure you pack the popcorn. And our mutual gravitational attraction is forcing us to merge.

It's taken a while, but now it's speeding up, and now it's around a 100 kilometers per second. So when you add that to the total, you get around another 250,000,000,000 lifetime kilometers. So you, personally, in your lifetime, that will last roughly 80 years, hopefully longer, due to the motion of the Milky Way as we gravitationally collide with the Andromeda Galaxy, you will move around an extra couple 1000000000 kilometers. So now our grand total of lifetime movement is around a trillion kilometers. A trillion.

1 trillion. Like like, we got up here. We got up into the trillions. It's not often we get up into the trillions in anything. A trillion kilometers of movement due to our Sun just following its orbital path in the Milky Way into the Milky Way on a collision course with Andromeda.

We're not done, of course, Milky Way, Andromeda, and Triangulum, which once again doesn't get nearly enough attention, feel free to ask about it, form what's called the local group. It's the local group of galaxies, pretty straightforward name. Us together as a group, we are all merging together. And then us as a group is also headed to the Virgo cluster, the nearest cluster of galaxies. It's about 65,000,000 light years away.

Then Virgo and all those smaller groups surrounding it, all of us are moving in the general direction of the great attractor. The great attractor is this point in space that is the local gravitational well of our local supercluster of where it's all merging together. It's currently occupied. The center of that point, the point that we call the great attractor is called, the Norma cluster. It's a very, very massive cluster of galaxies.

Everybody in our patch of the universe is headed for that point. And then, you know, that's our local supercluster, which we call Laniakea from the Hawaiian word for an immense or bountiful heaven. Our entire supercluster of Laniakea centered on the great attractor, which we are all moving towards. Our supercluster itself is moving in the direction of the shapely supercluster, so there's motion on top of that. We are talking now scales of 100 of millions of light years of motion that has started started 1,000,000,000 of years ago and is simply a process of gravity playing out.

When you put it all together, you get Patreon. That's patreon.com/pmsutter. It's how you can support this show. You get ad free versions, sneak previews, early releases. I even chat with you sometimes.

It's fun. It's fun when people ask questions on Patreon. Go check it out, and I truly do appreciate all the support. That's patreon.com/pmsutter. When you put all this together, the orbital motion of the Sun in the Milky Way, the movement towards Andromeda, the local group movement towards Virgo, Virgo and surroundings movement towards the Great Attractor, Laniakea's movement towards the Shapley supercluster, all told were moving about 630 kilometers per second, which gives, drumroll please, about 1.5 trillion kilometers of travel in a lifetime.

1.5 trillion kilometers. You, you will move 1.5 trillion kilometers in your life even if you don't twitch a single muscle. Now hold on hold on hold on. We're talking about motion. Right?

That's movement. Pretty obvious statement. But motion compared to what? Didn't we learn in special relativity that all movement is relative? You know, there's this whole Newtonian perspective of the cosmos that requires absolute rulers, standard clocks.

There's this imaginary fixed grid against which we judge all motion. And we can say, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. That bird is moving, and I can tell that it's moving because there is some universal reference frame, this, like, fixed grid, this fixed stage. And that bird is moving relative to that fixed stage, and that's how I how I know it's moving. And I'm standing still because I'm standing still relative to this fixed stage that that doesn't change throughout the universe.

Einstein rejected all that and said that all motion is relative, all measures in space and time are relative, hence the theory of relativity, and that measuring motion is a matter of perspective. I can say I'm perfectly still, and you're moving past me. You're flying in an airplane above me, and I'm standing still here on the surface of the earth, and you're crossing my field of view. I'm like, yeah, I'm standing still and you're moving. But from your perspective, you're sitting in the airplane, physics feels fine to you.

It doesn't feel like you're moving. You can toss balls in the air. You can eat snacks. You pour water into a cup, and everything behaves exactly as it behaves on the ground. So you say, no.

No. No. You're crazy. I'm staying still, and you, Paul, you are the one in motion. All motion is relative.

You can only judge movement from the perspective of someone else. So you might be tempted to say that, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not moving at all. I haven't moved 1,500,000,000,000 kilometers in my lifetime. On your deathbed you're saying, tell Paul I have not moved 1.5 trillion kilometers, I have moved 0.

Because all motion is relative and according to my perspective, I have not moved at all. I may now die in peace. Thankfully, we have a way out of this. And I can tell you that you will move 1.5 trillion kilometers. Because all this discussion of relative frames of reference, and no universal standards, no master clocks or or absolute frames of reference comes from special relativity.

But special relativity is not the end of the story. There's also general relativity which supplants special relativity, especially at large cosmological scales, which is what we are talking about. Special relativity says that there doesn't have to be a universal frame of reference. It doesn't say that there can't be. And in general relativity, which we use to understand the expansion of the universe, there are absolute frames of reference.

And that's through the expansion of the universe. The expansion of the universe, the fact that our universe is expanding, restores the concept of absolute frames of reference, and that's because the universe is expanding with time. Our universe changes from moment to moment. If we were to freeze frame the universe right now, it would be a certain size. It would have a a distinct physical size that you can measure.

And then you press play, wait a little bit, and press pause again. Now the universe is bigger. It's different. Because our universe changes with time, there is now a standard against which we can measure motion, and that is the cosmological standard. We can measure motion in an expanding universe because we can say, well, you moved, and I know you moved because when the universe was like this, and I have my hands out a certain distance apart, you were over here.

And then now when the universe is like this, and now my hands are a little bit farther apart, you're over here. The universe has changed in the meantime. And because it has changed, I can now lay down a grid. I can establish a universal reference frame and a master clock. This is how we're able to say with confidence that the universe is 13.77 1000000000 years old according to all observers because there's a universal clock now and there's also a universal standard, a frame.

There is motion with respect to the rest of the universe. And there is a special reference frame that is at rest that is motionless with respect to that expanding universe, and we can use that to judge all other motion on top of that within the universe. We can confidently say, oh, yes, you are definitely moving because you're moving with respect to the universal reference frame, that master ruler that is established by the fact that we live in an expanding universe. And we can observe. We actually have a way to directly observe this universal reference frame, hence with the Cosmic Microwave Background.

The Cosmic Microwave Background, the CMB, this is the radiation emitted when our universe cooled from a plasma state when it was about 380,000 years old. The radiation absolutely flooded the universe. It's responsible for something like 99.999, maybe a few more nines, percent of all the radiation in the universe. And the cosmic microwave background occurred that event occurred very quickly. It took, like, less than 10000 years, which is nothing on cosmological scale.

So it acts like a snapshot. We are bathed in radiation from all sides in the universe. And because that radiation completely soaks and perfectly soaks and is perfectly isotropic, which means, well, it's not perfectly isotropic, but to one part in a million, it is, which is good enough for what we're trying to do here. It's the same on all sides. It's completely soaking the universe, and it happened at once.

It had been at a specific moment in the history of the universe. It happened at a specific moment when the universe was a particular size at a particular time, and it froze that image. It froze it. Yes. It's red shifted.

It's lost energy. It's now different wavelengths, but it froze that state. It froze the the spatial configuration of that state, and it gives us a map. Light from all sides that started at the same time is arriving at the same time. It gives us a way to visualize that master ruler.

It gives us a way to measure absolute motion with respect to the entire universe. How? Well, if you're moving through the universe, then your view of the cosmic microwave background will be blueshifted in one direction. In the direction of your motion, you are moving towards that radiation, and so the wavelengths will scrunch up through Doppler shift, the exact same Doppler shift that changes the tone of a a passing siren. It will be blue shifted to shorter wavelengths, higher frequencies in the direction of your motion, and it will be red shifted in the opposite direction, in the direction behind you.

And the faster you're moving, the more blue shifted and red shifted that light will become, and the direction you're moving will change where on that cosmic microwave background sky you will see the hot spot, the the high energy radiation will come from that direction of your motion. You can use the cosmic microwave background as a speedometer. It's crazy. I know they said I said there are no speedometers. It turns out there's a speedometer at vast cosmological scales.

We can judge our motion with respect to the entire universe. And that is how we're able to arrive at our total motion through the cosmos. Dividing up the parts, like the orbital motion of the sun around the center, the movement towards the the Andromeda, our movement towards Virgo, that's a little bit trickier, like chopping up all the little bits and pieces to see how they all add together. But we can actually get the total motion relatively easily. And that's how we get 630 kilometers per second through observations of the cosmic microwave background.

And that's how we know that relative to the entire universe, you will travel 1.5 trillion kilometers. But before I go, let me throw in one more little thing. We've been talking about motion which as we normally understand it and talk about it we talk about motion through space, But what about motion through time? Even when you are perfectly still, even if you were to become at rest relative to the cosmic microwave background, relative to the whole entire universe. You were to stop the orbital motion of the sun.

Stop the motion of the Milky Way towards Andromeda. Stop the motion towards the great attractor. Stop all of it. And be at rest relative to the universe, you would still be moving. Where?

You'd be moving into your own future. We're all moving through time and that's motion. It's not a technicality. No. No.

No. No. Remember what we learned from Einstein? It's not space and time. It's space time.

It's one entity. Motion through space is identical to motion through time. You can measure it. It has a rate, one second per second. Sometimes a little bit faster.

Sometimes a little bit slower. You are moving into the future. That is motion. That counts as motion. That counts as movement.

We can actually trace this out through something we call world blinds. You and we've all seen, like, the drawings of the orbit of the earth around the sun. That's like a little plot, an orbital plot. Or following your path. You know, you you travel to some exotic locale for vacation, and you and you drive around a lot, and then you keep a a GPS logger, and you see all your twists and turns and curves and loops as you travel.

I want you to imagine taking the starting point and the end point of that loop. Like, you see, the squiggly line of all everywhere you traveled on vacation. I want you to take the start and end point. I want you to stretch them out into 3 dimensions. Right?

Because that plot just just measured your latitude and longitude, a nice little two dimensional line. Now you stretched it out. You pull it apart. You're now constructing a world line where that extra dimension that you've stretched out along is the dimension of time, because you started at one point in time, and you traveled through space, and your latitude and longitude change. You also traveled through time.

It was Tuesday, and then Wednesday, and then Thursday, and then Friday. An actual world line is a 4 dimensional object, which I cannot literally, I cannot imagine. Nobody can. We think 3 dimensionally. So just think about latitude and longitude and then stretching that line of where you travel down to the surface of the earth and extending that into a dimension of time.

You're constructing a world line. That is movement. In special relativity, that is movement. All the mathematics of special relativity, all the calculations we do, count that as movement. We have to, because space and time are unified.

We live in a 4 dimensional universe. If you just talk about motion through space, you are ignoring the motion through time. How fast are you moving through time? Well, it depends on your motion through space, but your total motion, your combined motion through space and time is always the speed of light. That's right.

Right now, you are moving at the speed of light. A little bit through space, 630 kilometers per second, which is like nothing compared to the speed of light, which is 300,000 kilometers per second. Light moves at the speed of light through space, and none through time. Anything traveling slower than the speed of light, which is everything else, travels a little bit through space and a lot through time. And you're traveling not at 630 kilometers per second, but around 300,000 kilometers per second, which gives your total lifetime movement in 80 years of around 750,000,000,000,000 kilometers.

In space, relative to the rest of the universe, you'll travel about 1.5 trillion kilometers, but through time, you'll travel around 750,000,000,000,000 kilometers. Almost all of that motion is into your own future. Your motion through space from your travels on the earth to the headlong rush towards the great attractor are almost meaningless. The most important, the most significant the longest journey you will make in your entire life is to live your life. It turns out that motion indeed has a subtle wit and there's something deeply poetic about that.

Thank you so much to Lise c on email who asked the question that led to today's episode. And thank you to my top Patreon contributors. That's patreon.com/pmsutter. We've got Justin g, Chris l, Barbara k, Duncan m, Corey d, Justin z, Nalia, Scott m, Rob h, Justin Lewis m, John w, Alexis Gilbert m, Joshua, John s, Thomas d, Simon g, Aaron j, Jessica k, and Valerie h. Please go to patreon.com/pmsutter to keep supporting the show.

I truly, truly do appreciate it. Keep sending me questions. It's hashtag ask a spaceman on social media or or just email me askaspaceman@gmail.com. You can also visit the website, ask a spaceman.com. There's a form there you can fill in to send your questions over.

And no matter what, I will see you in the future for more complete knowledge of time and space. Space.

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