Special relativity is a theory that is useful only when describing what happens at speeds close to the speed of light. Not many things on the planet move fast enough to deserve using it, However The planet itself does. Moving at a rate of 29819.8 meters per second the earth is cooking! To illustrate just how fast this is The fastest of any human vehicle is the space shuttle which orbits the earth at about 1/4 that speed. However even the blinding pace of our earth is snail like when compared with light. The earth moves at less than 1/1000 of light speed.

The speed of light itself is the ultimate speed limit of the universe.

299792458 meters per second
This speed limit is self enforcing, you couldn't speed if you tried. You just don't have the energy to do it. As you get close to "breaking the light barrier" your mass grows rapidly towards infinity and time begins slowing to a stop. On the bright side though you aren't likely to get a speeding ticket!

These effects allow us to design time machines for traveling into the future. We build a spaceship and skim close to the speed of light and pull back. The closer to the speed of light we skim the slower time moves for us. This means that for every second we pass on the spaceship hundreds or thousands could be passing on earth.(depending on just how close to the speed of light we are)

Unfortunately most of us will be unable to take such a fantastic ship ride into the future. However all of us are living on a gigantic spaceship that is moving through space at a small but appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Meaning that we are all moving just a bit faster into the future than the sun is.

Each point on the earths surface travels around the center of the earth at about 463 meters per second. In addition the Earth is moving around the sun at about 29819 meters per second. Meaning that relative to the sun people living at sea level have a speed of about 30283 meters/second.

According to special relativity time here on earth should move just a little slower than on the sun. Time on earth moves at about a hundred millionth of a second slower than time on the sun. That may not be very much, certainly no match for the dramatic ride in that spaceship, but it is something.And eventually all those hundred millionths of a second can add up. Every year we travel about 0.16089 of a second less than the sun into the future. Therefore from the perspective of the sun we are moving into the future faster than it.

It may not be much but it is long enough of a time to be measured without the use of atomic clocks.

All this time the earth itself has been moving slowly into the future as well. the center of the earth doesn't rotate around its axis and so is moving a little slower than the surface so that over its 4.6 billion year existence it would have traveled 22.825 years into the future. At a pace of just about .15 seconds and the surface would have traveled over 23.468 years.

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