How fast are we moving?

25:24Yeah, Earth is already kind of complicated. You might think, well, I'm standing on Earth. My velocity is zero, right? But the Earth itself is spinning, right? So which part of the Earth are we talking about? Yes, if you say the part of the Earth that's under your feet, your velocity is zero. That's kind of boring. But if you stay the center of the Earth, then at the surface of the Earth, you're already moving quite fast. Now, at the North Pole, you're not moving at all due to the spin. But at the equator, the Earth is spinning at 1 ,600 kilometers per hour. Whoa. Like, that's not a small amount of motion.

25:59No. You know, I realize that we don't feel that. But it is kind of amazing that we don't feel that. That is pretty quick. Yeah. And it's a little counterintuitive because this is acceleration, right? To move in a circle at constant velocity requires acceleration because velocity is a vector. And if it's changing direction, even if its magnitude is constant, then like moving in a circle, your velocity doesn't change, but the direction of your velocity changes. And that requires acceleration. Like if you have a rock moving through space at 10 meters per second, and you want it to be going a different direction at 10 meters per second, you got to give it a push.

26:36That's a force. That's acceleration. you might think I should be able to measure that. And you can actually. You can measure the rotation of the earth because it affects how much you weigh. Like at the equator, you weigh a little bit less than you do at the North Pole because you're being flung out a little bit. Like if you are on a merry-go-round and somebody's spinning it faster and faster and faster, there's this apparent force that's pushing you away from the center, right? That's due to the acceleration, which as we were saying earlier, is something that you can measure. And so you can actually measure this acceleration.

27:11How long did it take for us to figure out and accept that? Because that's all pretty counterintuitive. Yeah, it is counterintuitive. And it took a long time before people accepted this. When it was first proposed, people were like, what? That's crazy. And it took having fairly precise experiments in order to be able to measure it. There are a few different effects from this kind of rotation. There's the fact that you weigh less at the equator. And there's also this Coriolis force, which is effectively like a sideways force. If, for example, you drop something from like 150 meters, then it doesn't go straight down.

27:47It departs from straight down by like a millimeter or so. So it takes kind of a precise measurement. Actually, that was a question I was asked during my oral exam in grad school to like calculate that on the spot on a chalkboard in front of professors. I remember that. Oh, my God, that was terrible. But I think I got it right. They let you through one way or another. They did, yes. In 1851, the Foucault pendulum, which is basically like a lead-filled brass sphere, suspended on a really long string, in this case, 67 meters, you can see it rotate at a rate depending on its latitude. So it's like a pendulum that swings back and forth, but it also precesses.

28:25If you ever see these pendulums in like a science museum, like a really long string and it doesn't just go back and forth. It goes back and forth, but also the back and forth itself sort of rotates around and like leaves marks in the sand. That's because of the rotation of the earth. And that depends on the latitude. So if you do that experiment at the equator or you do that at the North Pole, you get a different answer because of the difference in tripetal acceleration. This kind of stuff is amazing. And like, so, so I have, you know, I gotta be honest, like I wouldn't want to spend my life creating precision weights or precision instruments and stuff.

28:59But like, so, you know, when you said if you took your weight at the equator and at the North Pole, they'd be different. But of course you don't actually mean like your weight because the journey from the North Pole to the equator, you know, you'd probably like change your weight. You know, you'd eat a big meal in between. So, so you're like, I'm sure what you meant, you're like, you'd have like a, you know, 20 kilogram weight or that you'd. Right. You know, compare at both locations. And you wouldn't feed any snacks to your 20-kilogram weight along the way. Yeah. Exactly. Right. No Cheetos. None of those Stroopwafels that they're giving on the flights now, which I am so excited that that's a new thing you can get on flights.

29:34Are you saying I couldn't go from the equator to the North Pole without resisting a Stroopwafel? I could not. But what I'm saying is— I couldn't either. Yeah. So 1851 is one of the experiments you were talking about. And so back then, it wouldn't just be a couple hours to get from the equator to the North Pole. It would be, you know, like half a year or more or something during that journey. So you'd change your weight during that time. But your 20-kilogram mass might not. But, like, there's so many things we learned about the world by getting really good at making precision measurements. And, like, we're such a boring and amazing species.

30:09Like, way to go us for managing to do that kind of stuff. And anyway, props to humans. Yeah, props to nerds. People who are like, I'm super interested in this. I'm going to get really good at that. And I'm going to somehow manage to take my 20 kilogram weight from the equator to the North Pole without getting caramel smeared on it or something. Yeah, right, right. Thank you, nerds. That's right. Yeah, and it's because of the diversity of people's interest in weird stuff that we know all these amazing things about the universe. So yay. Yay. So that's how we know that the Earth is spinning. Of course, we can also see it from space, etc.

30:42So the Earth is spinning at 1600 kilometers per hour at the equator. The Earth itself, of course, is moving relative to the sun. That's 30 kilometers per second, right? So pretty fast. Again, relative to the sun. And this, again, is motion in a circle. And motion in a circle requires constant acceleration to maintain the same magnitude of velocity. So this is also something you could measure. Like even if you were in a box, if you were orbiting a star, you could tell you were orbiting a star because that is an acceleration. Well, now I want to know when and how we figured that out. But it's not on your outline, so I'm putting you on the spot.

31:20Well, this all goes back to geocentrism and heliocentrism, right? We had these two theories of the organization of the solar system, one in which the Earth was at the center and everything moved around it, another one where the sun was at the center and everything moved around it. And I think it's fascinating that the Greeks actually had the idea for heliocentrism. People often say, oh, the Greeks just assumed that the earth is at the center. They considered heliocentrism. They considered the idea that the sun was at the center. And they even had an idea for how to check. They thought that they could look at the stars.

31:52And if the earth was moving around the sun, they would see the stars wiggle in the sky. And they were right. They should be seeing that. That's called parallax. But they were wrong about the distance to the stars. They thought the stars were pretty close, so they should be able to see the parallax. And when they didn't see the parallax, they concluded incorrectly that the Earth wasn't moving. If they had known the stars were so far away, they would have realized that you can't use parallax to discover the motion of the Earth unless you have really fine telescopes. And we weren't able to do that until like the 1800s.

32:22Oh, man, how frustrating. They were so close. I know. So close. They were really on the edge of this. They made the wrong assumption, led them down the wrong path. Anyway, a couple thousand years later, people figured out that the Earth is moving around the Sun, but not by measuring the acceleration, the local acceleration of the Earth, but by seeing the phases of Venus. And then also getting more precise measurements of the motion of the planets so we could see that geocentrism didn't really work, though it worked surprisingly well, even with cycles and epicycles. But then how did we figure out the 30 kilometers per second figure?

32:53Oh, there you could just use Kepler's laws. Like if you know the period of the planet and the distance to the sun, then you can figure out our local velocity. It's just basic kinematics. So we've known that for hundreds of years. Folks, you should all know that Daniel didn't write that down in his notes. He just has this all in his head. He's a smart guy. All right, keep going. This is basic stuff, Kelly. You didn't have to be a jerk face. I was just saying something nice. I'm just trying to deflect your compliment. Thank you very much. All right. Yeah, that's what you're supposed to say, Daniel.

33:26And so there are these videos out there that try to break people out of the mental image of the Earth moving around the sun and the sun being stationary. And I think that's cool because it's true that the sun is not stationary with respect to the galaxy, but it doesn't really mean anything to say the sun is moving through space, right? It's always relative to something. So even if you have like a stationary image of the solar system, if you're approaching the solar system with a velocity, then the sun is in motion relative to you. Like if you are on 3i Atlas, the interstellar visitor, then the sun is in motion.

33:59Or if you put yourself at the center of the galaxy, then the sun is in motion. So it's true that you can move to a frame where the sun is in motion instead of a frame where the sun is at rest. But it's a little misleading to suggest that like, oh, really, the sun is moving through space. It's moving relative to something. And the most interesting thing it's moving with respect to is the center of the galaxy. And how fast is it moving with respect to the center of the galaxy? It's moving 800 ,000 kilometers per hour around the center of the galaxy, which is like a big number. But, you know, it doesn't really affect your life because think about it the other way.

34:35It means that the center of the galaxy is moving 800 ,000 kilometers per hour relative to us. But it's really far away. So, like, who cares how fast it's moving relative to us? doesn't mean anything for us here on Earth. Though it is fun to think about how long it takes the sun to go around the center of the galaxy. It takes a couple hundred million years for the sun to do one orbit. So if you think about that as a galaxy year, the way the Earth takes one Earth year to go around the sun, the sun takes one galaxy year to go around the center of the galaxy, then our solar system is about 20 galaxy years old.

35:13She's almost old enough to drink. I know. I wonder what her preferred drink's going to be. It might be tea. Maybe she's not into alcohol. Cosmopolitan, maybe. Oh, cute. Love it. That's probably what it's going to be. Yeah. I think that's pretty cool because it means the galaxy has not had that many rotations. It's already formed all of the structure and the spiral arms and all that stuff without spinning more than 50 times. Right? That's kind of mind-blowing. That is kind of mind-blowing. Yeah. How many turns around the galaxy is it going to have? Do you know? Well, that's a great question. Well, we're scheduled for a collision with Andromeda in a few billion years.

35:53And that's only another like 10-ish or 15-ish rotations. Change the subject. Before we get all messed up again. Yeah, nope, nope, nope. I don't want to hear this. All right, moving on. And of course, you can ask, well, is the galaxy in motion? But then you have to ask, is it motion relative to what? And so there's a bunch of different choices you can make here. You could choose the local galaxy cluster and say, we're orbiting around the center of mass in the galaxy cluster. But I think here we should skip forward to the biggest picture question and say, is there any kind of frame out there you could use that's like the center of stuff?

36:30Because on one hand, there is no preferred frame in the universe for space. You can't say I'm moving through space with respect to anything. But there is a bunch of stuff in the universe. And you can ask, how fast am I moving relative to all the stuff in the universe? So this feels like a weird kind of card trick. You have no velocity relative to space, but I can then fill space with a bunch of stuff, like space was filled with a hot, dense plasma a few billion years ago. And that stuff has no velocity relative to space either, right? Because you can't have velocity relative to space. But it does mean that now I can ask, how fast am I going?

37:07relative to that stuff. So it's sort of like I put wallpaper on the wall and I said, you can't ask your velocity relative to the wall, but you can ask your velocity relative to the wallpaper. Yeah, it feels like cheating. It does feel like cheating. But in this case, the wallpaper isn't there, right? Because the plasma is not there, right? Or it was a long time ago, but it's not there now. Yeah. So the plasma is not there anymore. And really, the wallpaper has no velocity relative to the wall. It's just like, there's something else in the room with us now. So we can finally ask, do we have a velocity relative to something?

37:44It's like, go back to that empty universe. You have no velocity. It means nothing to have a velocity. Then I fill that universe with stuff. Now you have a velocity relative to all of that stuff. And that stuff has no velocity relative to anything else in the universe, except for you or itself. It has no velocity relative to space, right? But there is a preferred frame in the universe. That frame is the frame of all the stuff in the universe. And so you can't ask about your velocity relative to space, but you can ask about your velocity relative to the stuff in the universe. And why is that the preferred, why is the frame that doesn't actually exist and is a mind trick, the preferred frame?

38:29Because it's the only one we can think of. Okay. All right. There's no other option, right? Dig in the honesty. You can either give up or you can choose this one. And neither is satisfactory. And how fast are we going relative to the space wallpaper? The answer is we don't know. We actually have two different measurements and they disagree by a lot. What? All right, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll make things even more confusing.

39:00You thought this was going to be a simple episode, didn't you? I hope so.

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41:56And we're back. And we should have saved this episode for Halloween because we're going to talk about the spooky radio dipole anomaly. So we're interested in the question of how fast are we moving relative to all the stuff in the universe? Because you take an empty universe and you plop a bunch of stuff into it. Now there's a frame, right? The frame in which that stuff is at rest. And how do you measure that? Well, we're going to talk about two different ways of measuring it. One tries to measure our velocity relative to the stuff in the early universe. So brief history of the universe, a bunch of stuff happened that we don't understand at all, but somehow led to a universe filled with a very hot, dense plasma.

42:37That plasma is opaque and that it's cooling as the universe expands. Suddenly it cools enough for the protons and electrons to get together and make neutral hydrogen. And the universe suddenly becomes transparent, which means all the light that previously was being absorbed just after it was emitted now flies free. Be free, little lights. And the universe has been transparent ever since then, which means we can still see that light. We can see evidence of that hot, dense plasma. And that's what's called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's microwave because that's the frequency we see it at.

43:11It was a very, very high frequency because very hot plasma is a very high frequency light, but it's been stretched out by the expansion of the universe to very long wavelengths and low frequency. So we can still see that light and we can see Doppler shifts in that light. Okay. So we can still see that light, which means basically we can look around and see that plasma, right? And it's a little bit confusing to think about what part of the plasma we're seeing. If you look in one direction from earth, you're seeing light that's been traveling basically 14 billion years since it was emitted and just got to Earth.

43:48If you look in the other direction from Earth, you're seeing light that traveled 14 billion years since it was emitted and just got to Earth. So you're looking at bits of plasma that were like across the universe from each other. If you look all around the Earth, you're seeing light from a shell of plasma that emitted light in the direction where Earth was going to be and just arrived here now. And as time goes on, We see light from a different shell of plasma, a larger and larger shell, further and further away from us. But we're always going to see CMB light because the universe was filled with this plasma.

44:23So it's a great way to measure our velocity relative to the stuff in the universe back when the universe was filled with this plasma that conveniently all gave off this light. But so everything you just said made sense. But we're talking about an anomaly. So I feel like I wasn't supposed to understand all of it. No, you're still supposed to understand it. And the way we measure our velocity relative to that light is pretty simple. We just look to see if the light is blue shifted or red shifted. Because if you're moving towards something, frequency goes up. If you're moving away from something, frequency goes down.

44:57Wavelengths get longer. And most of the time when you look at a picture of the CMB, like on the internet, it looks like all these little red and blue dots. And what you're looking at there is not the raw CMB light. What you're looking at is that when they remove our velocity effect, if you look at the raw CMB, it's like blue on one side and red on the other because we are moving relative to the CMB. We're not at rest relative to it. So they usually subtract this part out because we're moving at 370 kilometers per second through the CMB. So pretty fast. Yeah. Look at us go. So that's sort of the closest we can come to saying, how fast are we moving through this stuff in the universe.

45:37But it's a big number and people would like to know, is that really correct? Are we making a mistake? And what we're measuring there is our velocity relative to the stuff that used to be in the universe 14 billion years ago. We can do a cross-check by looking at the stuff in the universe now and asking, well, how fast are we moving relative to distant galaxies, for example, and all that stuff. And so we can make the same measurement. We can look for galaxies and we can ask like, is there like blue shifted or red shifted? And that should make a map across the sky of like blue shifted versus red shifted galaxies and tell us which direction are we going and how fast relative to all the galaxies out there in the universe, not relative to space again, relative to the stuff in the universe.

46:21And we should get the same answer because the galaxies out there in the universe, they came from the CMB stuff, right? That stuff clumped together and made structure and eventually formed galaxies which spun for a few times before they collided with other galaxies, et cetera. So we should get the same answer, right? Well, so then why did we need to do all this CMB stuff if we could have just done it with the galaxies? Or it's just nice to double check, replication is good? It's nice to double check, and you think you should get the same answer in two different ways, so you always got to do it both ways, right?

46:51Got it. That's the worrier in you, like, hmm, what if we got it wrong? Let's double check. Yeah, anxiety. And so they recently made this measurement, it's tough to do. You've got to look at galaxies in the radio. You have to subtract all sorts of other effects. Galaxies are not as spread out evenly as the CMB is. And so fascinatingly, what they find is they measure the same direction of motion. So they agree the CMB measurement and this radio galaxy measurement agree in the direction, but the radio galaxy suggests that we're moving two to five times faster than the CMB measurement says. Oh, that's the anomaly.

47:27That's the anomaly. It's called the radio dipole anomaly, a pretty recent measurement. And it's not understood. Either it means there's something very wrong with our understanding of the universe and how it's evolved over time. But that would be pretty surprising because we really think the CMB was there and it filled the universe and it was mostly smooth and the universe has expanded isotropically. So it'd be pretty hard to explain how this happened. And most likely this is due to something boring, like these radio galaxies have to be seen through a telescope. They're all in different locations and the telescope isn't as good at spotting them in different locations.

48:05Or the measurements of their velocity are not quite as accurate. Or the calibration changes over the sky and maybe drifts as you move the telescope. So people are hunting for an explanation. And usually what you do is look for a boring explanation. Like, oh, every time somebody made ramen in the microwave in the break room, our data shifted by two points, right? That was an actual explanation for an astrophysical anomaly in Australia. Oh, no. Yeah, it was burritos in the microwave. So you always look for those kind of things before you conclude, everything we know about the universe is wrong, which is how the clickbait of many of these articles started out.

48:42Yeah. Well, also, you know, I think what we should conclude is that we need more money for better telescopes so that we can make all of these measurements more accurately. Exactly. And you should look at not just radio galaxies, but other kinds of galaxies and other stuff in the universe. And we should measure this kind of stuff in lots of different ways, because this is how you make discoveries, folks. You think you understand something, you double check it, you get an answer that's not what you expected. And that forces you to reconsider your ideas about the universe. And you sometimes hear out there on the internet that scientists will protect the narrative because they don't want to upend the apple cart in order to get grants and like, no, absolutely not.

49:20Scientists love to upend the narrative. You know, that's why you see these crazy clickbait articles. It's a scientist trying to upend the narrative with their latest study, which blows up our understanding of the universe. That's how you get the awards. Exactly. Scientists are not working together to protect some narrative. They're all working against each other desperately using every trick they can to prove their friends and rivals wrong. Yeah. There are varying degrees of cutthroat. I don't want to make everybody sound like a jerk, but yes, I agree. If you can prove the dominant narrative wrong, that's when you get all the awards.

49:55All right. Well, Daniel, I am exhausted from all of this moving. Can we talk about are there ways to not move, ways to stay motionless in space? Yeah. So it doesn't mean anything to be motionless with respect to space, right? And people sometimes write to me about this question when they read time travel fiction. And they're like, if I went back in time to 1492, wouldn't the earth be in a different place? And how come this science fiction novel I read didn't account for that? And you're giving me a funny look. This is a very common question. People think that they gotcha. And like, well, number one, time travel breaks the laws of physics anyway.

50:31And so maybe you should give the author a little bit of leeway on this detail. Also, the question doesn't really have any meaning. Like the Earth's location over time only means something relative to some axis, to some frame. So if you choose the frame of the Earth, then like you go back in time and you're still on the Earth. So yes, if you chose the frame of the Sun, the Earth would be in a different location in 1492 than it is now. But the question doesn't really have meaning. Oh, I see what they were getting at now. You would – your time machine would dump you in the vastness of space instead of on Earth, and that would be bad.

51:08Okay, okay, all right. Okay, but we've decided to let it go. Enjoy your fiction. Number one, let it go, which is my approach when I read time travel fiction, as I rarely do for that reason. And number two, the question assumes some absolute reference frame, right, which just doesn't exist. And you might think, well, what is the right reference frame? And there is none, right? And the problem here is that time travel doesn't make any sense anyway. And so there's no hard physics way to ask that question. But you can be motionless with respect to other stuff, which can be cool. Like, for example, you can be motionless with respect to a point on the Earth's surface, right?

51:47A point on the Earth's surface? If, for example, you want to build a space elevator, you want that space elevator to be connected to the Earth by a cable. And so you'd like it to be effectively in geosynchronous orbit above someplace, hopefully on the equator, that you built this thing. And so that's geosynchronous orbit. We have no motion relative to the Earth's surface. You're still in orbit. There's still acceleration. You have velocity relative to the center of the Earth. But you can have no motion relative to the Earth's surface. Can I tell you a fun story about space elevators? Yes, you can.

52:20I'll try to keep it short. No, don't. So the hard thing about making a space elevator is trying to come up with a material for the cable that is strong enough to hold the elevator but also isn't so heavy that you're just like lifting the cable the whole time. And so carbon nanotubes might one day maybe work, but we haven't made a continuous one that's long enough. But even if you did, what you'd really have to worry about is if it ever got struck by lightning, that could like – the game over. Like it could destroy the cable. And so I was talking to somebody about what to do about that. And their answer was, well, you know, there's this part of the ocean that's never recorded a lightning strike.

52:58And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. You know that meme where they have the airplane and like airplanes that return only have hits in these locations like the survivor effect meme? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's basically that one. Wow. I think that wasn't just a meme. I think that was actually like a study during World War I or II. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all good memes. Yes, yes. That cracked me up. I'm like, all right, fingers crossed. There's never any lightning here again. And then I think you also wanted the ability to be able to move it a little bit in case a storm came through. Well, I think the terrifying thing, as you guys pointed out in your book Soonish, is what happens when the cable snaps.

53:32Because basically now you have this like kill wire moving at high velocity, like somehow across the Earth's surface and like yikes. Yeah, right. Or if somebody decides to snip your wire, forget if there's lightning, just like a terrorist cutting your wire. Okay. Anyway, no more doomsday scenarios relative to space elevators. Let's talk about Lagrange points because I always found these slightly confusing, but you can clear it up for me. Well, I'm confused because I call them Lagrange points. Look, nobody expects me to say it right. They expect you to say it right. That's your responsibility, not mine.

54:06Well, it depends. Are they named after, you know, Jean-Louis Lagrange or are they named after the city in Texas or the ZZ Top song or, you know? I think the ZZ Top song, probably. How, how, how, how, how. Nice. Now that we've both done that together, I think we've made this joke before. And we'll probably make it again. Probably, because that's how our memories work. I look forward to it. But yeah, there are these fun points where you can be at rest relative to the Earth-Sun system. Like, for example, if you are the James Webb Space Telescope, and you don't want to be in orbit around the Earth because you need to be super-duper cold, you can choose to be at Lagrange point two, which is on the other side of the earth from the sun, where all the gravitational effects of the earth and the sun cancel out.

54:51And so you could just sort of like hang out there. Yeah. So I guess when I look, all right, so I'm looking at the diagram that you provided. And so you've got this like spot that's on the far side of the earth and on the far side of the sun. And I guess I always kind of feel like, why doesn't it just drift away? But I guess you still have the gravity pulling it in. And I'm not sure I have a really great question to ask here. Just kind of. Well, so imagine that you wanted to be in the Earth's orbit, right? So you have Earth and it's orbiting the sun. And you're like, hey, I want to join the Earth's orbit.

55:20Where could you be in Earth's orbit? Well, if you were right next to the Earth, then you and the Earth would pull on each other and you would smash into the Earth. So try to get a little bit further from the Earth. Well, how far away from the Earth do you have to be? Well, one solution is to be on the other side of the sun from the Earth. So that's Lagrange point three. If you and the Earth are on opposite sides of the sun, then you won't pull on each other and you can share an orbit with the Earth, right? Okay. So you can both hang out in the same orbit without crashing into each other. So that's what you want.

55:50It turns out there are two more points. There's Lagrange point four and five, which are like 30 degrees ahead or behind the Earth. It can also be in those points where everything balances out and you can both be in orbit together. And this is why Jupiter, for example, has a big cluster of asteroids ahead of it and behind it in its orbit. I think they're called the Trojans and the Greeks. Cool. Love it. I hope they get along. Ironic foreshadowing. And another one is to be between the Earth and the Sun. So closer to the Earth because the Earth has less gravity. But between the Earth and the Sun, that's Lagrange point one.

56:28Lagrange point two is on the outside past the Earth's orbit, and it's basically in a line from the sun to the Earth and then past it. And so you can be out there where your orbit is not disturbed by the Earth. You could also just be in Lagrange point two in orbit around the sun and be fine. But then if you're not synced up with the Earth, the Earth is going to disturb your orbit every time it passes you. But if you're synced up with the Earth, so you're always keeping the Earth, sun, and your telescope in a line, then everything is stable. And that's where the James Webb Space Telescope hangs out because the Earth provides a shade from the sun and the telescope needs to be super duper cold so that it doesn't emit radiation in the same wavelengths that it's observing.

57:10Okay, so it's constantly in motion relative to the sun. But not the Earth. But not the Earth. And have humans put things in all of these Lagrange points? So we've used Lagrange points one and two. One is the one that's closer to the sun, and two is the one that's further from the sun. At two, for example, we have the James Webb Space Telescope. And it's not actually at two, it's orbiting two. So you can put other stuff there. And there are things at one which are pretty close to Earth. For example, there's like the solar and heliospheric observatory is there. And other stuff likes to be there.

57:44And we haven't put anything at four and five. They're kind of a little bit far away. The James Webb Space Telescope is already kind of far away for an observatory. And four and five are even further. And three is super far. So we put anything at three yet? No. Three is super duper far away. It's on the other side of the Earth. And that wouldn't be terribly convenient because we couldn't communicate with it very easily because the sun would be in the way. Yeah. And so that's basically all you can do to be like motionless in the universe. You could try to be like motionless with respect to the CMB frame if you'd like.

58:19That wouldn't like feel very special. You could try to be motionless with respect to the Earth and hang out in space at one of the Lagrange points. And that's kind of special. And you can see things about the universe that's cool. But in general, motion is something kind of slippery because it requires you to measure your velocity with respect to something else in the universe. It's not a lonely concept. It requires you to be paired up with something out there in the universe. So there is no solo motion or solo location in the universe. You want to be in motion? You got to find a friend. That's a nice note to end on.

58:53All right, Extraordinaries, thank you for moving through the universe with us. We appreciate you spending time with us.

59:06Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows if you contact us we will get back to you we really mean it we answer every message email us at questions at danielandkelly.org or you can find us on social media we have accounts on x instagram bluesky and on all of those platforms you can find us at d and k universe don't be shy write to us this july 4th come celebrate at america's block party hosted by america 250 America's Block Party is a can't-miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

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