Assuming you wouldn’t explode from going mach ba-gillion in a Camry, and other things barred by a neat thing called physics, if you were going like a hundred thousand miles in a minute, or whatever it takes to clear the entire U.S in an hour. Would it all be straight? Or would the road comically start bending downwards?
In: Physics
the earth’s curvature is so gradual over large distances that even if you’re zipping across the continent at unimaginable speeds, the highway would still look straight to you. The curvature becomes more apparent when you’re looking at much larger scales, like from space
Visually you’ll never see it, it’s no different from just standing in a big flat area and looking all around.
The effects on driving? Well, if you drove fast enough, then you would actually be going just short of orbit speed for the surface of the Earth.
If you went above about 7900m/s (28,500km/h), you would be at ground level orbit speed. At that point, the ground not catch up fast enough, so your tires would start to lose contact, which would limit your speed (assuming it doesn’t just lift off and go kaboom).
Realistically though, the aerodynamics of your car will either create lift well before that point, or provide so much downforce you would need to be going several times faster.
Rockets leave the Earth by going fast enough. If you could somehow get your car going fast enough, which typically requires a rocket anyway, you’d go into some kind of orbit, the shape of which would depend on your speed relative to the escape velocity. From a high enough orbit, you’d definitely see the curvature.
If you somehow managed to drive at a hundred thousand miles pe rminute wou would pretty much just fly straight off of earth. Cause you have waaay bypassed earth’s escape velocity.
The you would continue traveling out, and escape the solar system as well. And once that was done, and a looooong time later, you would escape the milky way going… Well know the hell knows where.
Despite going so fast that you would go flying out of the galaxy, you would still be going a bit less than 1% of the speed of light, which isn’t really relevant to your question, but is still interesting to think about.
So, if you went fast enough, the curvature of the earth would make itself very apperant, when you essentially left the surface and went into space. You would only ever see curvature in your rear view mirror though, as that’s where the earth would be when you are far away enough to see the curve by eye.
Not entirely sure what you’re asking.
A perfectly straight road that hugs the earth at the exact same elevation would be curved, yes. That’s just geometry. If it was actually straight in all dimensions, it would stick out of the earth and into space. So yes, there is a curve.
Going fast doesn’t really change what you see (unless you’re going relativistic speeds), so I’m not sure how that’s relevant? If you were standing still on the road, you’d see the same thing as if you were zooming down it at 1000 miles an hour (though the latter might be blurrier).
But yes, you can absolutely see the curvature of the earth. It’s easier from a higher vantage point (you know, like outer space), but you can prove it even close to ground level.
It might be hard to see on a flat road on the ground, but there are pictures of power line towers that clearly curve down as they approach the horizon. Google Lake Pontchartrain power lines.
Your perspective of the earth isn’t changing, you’re just translating your position very fast. The horizon would look just the same. Even if you could travel 50% the speed of light or faster and stay glued to the surface without flying off into space your perspective would not change. You’re simply too close to the earth
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