When you next fume about politics, give yourself some distance.
If I’m in sitting in the living room reading the latest headlines or watching cable news, I get very steamed. But if I walk to the kitchen, let’s say, my anger drops. If the kitchen is low on snacks, my anger will drop some more: it takes time to find my keys, grab a jacket, and shout, “I’m going to the store” upstairs to my wife. I then add a little speed to the equation: backing the car out of the garage, rolling down and out of the alley, driving down Larpenteur Avenue to the store. Now that I’ve given myself distance from the news, smoke is no longer blowing out my ears.
In one sense I haven’t gone long, fast or far. When I run the numbers, however, I discover that I’ve moved at such mind-boggling speeds, even a smidgen of time renders ridiculous the diatribes I’d hurled at the headlines.
What am I talking about? Earth’s rotation + earth’s revolution + velocity of the solar system within the galaxy + velocity of the galaxy relative to CBR (cosmic background radiation). Here’s the math:
1,041 mph (at the equator; less as you move toward the poles; the earth is 25,000 miles in diameter and an earth day (one rotation) is 24 hours; divide distance by time and you get earth’s rotational speed)
+
66,659 mph (earth is 93 million miles from the sun; to figure how far earth travels in its annual revolution round the sun, use C(ircumference) = 2πr; r(adius) = 93 million miles; thus, C = 2 x 3.14159265359 x 93 million miles = 584.336 million miles; divide by time (365.25 days x 24 hrs. = 8,766 hrs.))
+
43,000 mph (I had to look this one up—apparently our solar system is moving through the Milky Way at this velocity (at an angle of about 63 degrees from the plane of the galaxy) relative to neighboring systems)
+
499,000 mph (I took the average of a couple of different credible academic sources; I think the difference is attributable to the “fuzziness” of the galaxy boundary combined with the fact the galaxy is a spiral with multiple arms and spurs; for general purposes, the diameter is roughly 105,700 light years, which means the whole outfit fully revolves once about every 225 million years; our part thus moves at about 499,000 mph)
+
1.3 million mph (something else I had to look up; based on the discovery of Big Bang background radiation by Nobel Prize Laureates Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs).
When you next fume at the news, consider the Big Sum: 1.910 million mph. Surely that figure will overwhelm all thunder and lightning inside your head. By the time the current crises have yielded to the next set, we will have moved far beyond where we were yesterday; I mean where we were when you started reading this post (at 31,828 miles per minute).
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
