would we be go ing at light speed relative to some point in space?

Question

if the Earth is spinning, and going around the sun, and the sun in going around something bigger, and that is going around something bigger and so on and so forth, wouldn’t we be going the speed of light or some where close? Any one know how fast if its not the speed of light?

Answer 1

No.

Relativity is weird. If one object is going at 0.9*lightspeed in one direction, and another object is going at 0.9*lightspeed in the opposite direction, they are not moving away from each other at a speed greater than that of light. Spacetime gets curved, distances get distorted, and the two objects end up moving away from each other at a speed slightly below lightspeed.

It's not intuitive at all. This is why so many physicists thought Einstein was crazy, when he first proposed the theory of relativity.

Answer 2

Yes.
You can't see that point.

When we try to look further and further away, we find that we see further and further back in time. That is because light travels at a finite speed (meaning: light travels at a fixed speed, not infinite).
We have also observed that space itself is expanding. The further away things are, the more space 'grows' between us and the object. This is the same result as if the object was moving away from us at a certain speed. However the object is not travelling through the section of space it occupies.

This expansion is regular, it grows with distance and seems to go on forever.

Conclusion, there is a distance at which the rate of increase of distance (due to expansion) is equivalent to the speed of light. So, from an object located at that distance, we would seem to move at the speed of light.

However:

1) light from such an object would never get to us because the expansion of space is such that the distance from the light to us remains the same (even though the light is moving towards us at the speed of light through its own section of space), and

2) when we look at that distance, we are looking so far into the past that the Universe was being born (meaning: when we try to look that far, we only see the Big Bang, we cannot see any actual objects).

If the universe really is infinite (and most scientists think so), then there could even be objects that are so far away that the rate at which the distance to them increases is greater than the speed of light.

This is not a contradiction of Einstein's Relativity: the objects themselves are not moving through space at speeds greater than the speed of light. It is the expansion of space that is adding distance between us and such objects.

Answer 3

The earth spins at 1000 mph (24,000 miles in circumference and a day is 24 hrs long, therefore the earth's surface - at the equator - is travelling at 1000 mph - note: not at the poles) that has nothing to do with the earth's speed as it travels around the sun in it's orbit, that speed comes out to roughly 66,000 mph or around 20 mps. You must also understand that this speed is only the speed of the earth relative to the position of the sun. The sun itself is travelling thru space (along with the entire solar system) around the center of the milky way galaxy at a speed of roughly 40,000 mph. All speeds are relative however, depending on what you are comparing them to. This was Einstein's explanation according to the theory of Relativity. There is no absolute frame of referance - in other words, there is no point in space, no object in space that we know of that is absolutely stationary so that we could finally resolve all the speeds of the earth, the solar system, the galaxy etc with relation to that point or object and come to a final speed. Not only that, but there is no way to find such an object.

Answer 4

According to Einstein's equation of E=MC^2, light, or other massless particles, are the only thing that can travel at that speed because it is massless. That means the energy required for light to travel at its highest speed is equal to zero. Once you start adding mass to the equation, more and more energy is required. As the speed of a object with mass approaches the speed of light, the energy required to keep the object accelerating faster becomes greater and at the moment of apparent light-speed, the energy needed becomes infinite and the mass of the object becomes infinite. This is known as the 'light barrier' since infinite mass and infinite energy are scientific impossibilities.

Answer 5

right now scientist has figure out how can we travel at the speed of light and according to Einstein' theory of general relativity we can travel at the speed of light when matter has no mass and according to the famous equation E=MC squared where E is equal to energy, M is equal to mass and C is equal to the speed of light which is roughly 299 792 458 m / s. And now we cannot tell how fast are we really travel because it is a vast universe... hope that can answer your question.... Your Welcome...

Answer 6

That's an interesting question. I suppose there might be some object, planet-sized or bigger, that is moving close to the speed of light relative to us.

But I doubt it, because we know that no galaxy is moving away from us at near light speed and any planet within that galaxy would be moving roughly our speed away from us. I doubt they would add up to anywhere near c.