if a bug is flying around your car while you’re driving 60mph on the highway, is the bug flying at 60mph?

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if a bug is flying around your car while you’re driving 60mph on the highway, is the bug flying at 60mph?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Let’s do a thought experiment for a moment.

You’re in a train, traveling 100mph. Outside, you can see the scenery pass. You stand up and walk to the front of the train. Technically speaking, you’d be travelling 100mph plus the speed of you walk. If you walked towards the back, 100mph *minus* the speed of your walk. But you only feel the speed of your walk plus the bumps of the train, but not the *speed* of the train.

So the fly would be much the same. Technically 60mph plus it’s own speed, but it wouldn’t perceive the 60mph as 60.

Now zoom out a little bit, if you want your mind to explode. The earth is spinning at nearly 1,000mph. We don’t feel that on the surface.

Zoom out a little more, and earth is orbiting around the sun at a speed of around 67,000mph.

Zoom out a little more, the sun (and with it, the entire solar system) is travelling through space at around 450,000mph.

But why don’t we feel it?

Perception, and how it relates to you. Others have chimed in on that, but I *still* don’t fully understand it. It blows my mind to think about.

Plus, if you were on a ship travelling the speed of light somehow, you’d technically be going faster than the speed of light by walking towards the front, no? It’s insane to me. Plus, the way time works and speed of light works, you’d travel through freaking ***time*** if you were to go the speed of light somehow.

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