What are the fastest moving objects with some mass in everyday life?
9 months ago by 5715 to c/asklemmy
I was watching a SciFi tv show where large objects had an outer speed limit of 18000 kph and that got me wondering what things in everyday life are faster than even 500 kph.
I know bullets can be fast, but they are not exactly everyday life (at least in my life).
I included mass for obvious relativistic reasons.
Let's break it down...
The distance, between the traffic light and the cab driver, should be approximately 10 meters.
The time light needs to reach the cab driver's eyes is:
D ÷ c = 10 ÷ 299,792,458 = 0.0000000333... seconds = 0.0000333... milliseconds
The distance between the cab's horn and your ears, should be approximately 5 meters.
The time needed for the cab's honk sound, to reach our ears is:
D ÷ u = 5 ÷ 295 = 0.0169491525 seconds = 16.9491525 milliseconds
If the cab driver had a reaction time of zero, it would still take 16 milliseconds for us, to hear their honk.
The conclusion is that cab drivers have a negative reaction time, so that they can honk before the light turns green, breaking causality.
Some sex includes supersonic elements, then.
🎵 I wanna make a supersonic man out of you 🎶
I don't think that those people waiting in line to go swimming wanted to be grabbed.
Kill the Queen
Traditionally, you use a rider's crop in sex, in which case, the cracking sound is the flap clap when you slap.
Bull whips, the ones that go supersonic, are often considered less sexy because they rip flesh and make people stop feeling all good and sexy.
Not that I've ever used either in sex. This is just what was explained to me back when I did photo shoots for BDSM community members and events.
That's awesome knowledge! Thanks for sharing and enlightening me! :D
Gotta go fast
That's cool
Super sonic means above 340 m/s, give or take some meters.
It seems that depending on the type of glass and the direction of the waves (longitudinal, shear, or Extensional) the speed of sound in glass can be between 2300-6000 m/s
Longitudinal is the type we normally think of though, and that is between 3900-5600 m/s. Which is still much more variation than I was expecting.
The speed of sound in air is around 340 m/s depending on temperature.
So if the op is correct about the speed, then it seems the cracks propagate slower than the speed of sound in glass.
OP specifically asked for something with mass. This is not a thing with mass. This is the same as saying a shadow can move faster than the speed of light.
breaks a pane of glass over your head
let me see you do that with a shadow
Haha
Not the same thing, since the movement of a shadow from point A to point B does not cause any transfer of energy or information between those points, whereas the shattering of glass can be initiated from point A and travel to point B at the given speed, transferring information (and possibly energy) between them.
As for not being a moving object, that's fair, and why they mentioned it's not quite the same thing in their comment.
Satellites are visible and move at some km per second. Pretty fast
Inside the atmosphere anything faster than some hundreds km/h get so much drag that they either are extremely small (bullets) or extremely powerful (planes, maglev trains)
Are we observing them moving, or are they stationary and we are the ones moving? dramatic dun-dun-duuuunnnn
(kinda joke kinda serious)
The answer is yes, depending on your frame of reference.
You're moving at about 700 m/s while sitting in your couch, according to Earth's rotation. So if the plane goes west at max speed, it would be 1400 m/s faster than going east.
And planes reach their higher speeds only at altitude where density is lower
A finger snap is incredibly fast, occurring in just 7 milliseconds, making it the fastest rotational acceleration in the human body, with peak speeds reaching 7,800 degrees per second—about three times faster than a professional baseball pitcher's arm—thanks to the perfect balance of skin friction and compression.
Not saying you're wrong, just pointing out this is interesting.
A baseball pitcher snapping his fingers is where it's at.
thing a human body by itself can produce...
...but nobody has measured my farts yet.
We have liftoff
Some viruses particles explode out of cells with crazy force. I don't know it off the top of my head but I remember reading about that somewhere.
Some MLB pitchers are able to throw baseballs faster than 100MPH. Nerve signals can travel through the body at 200MPH.
Wow, that's nuts
I sneeze obnoxiously loud. I bet I break 130 mph easy. How do I go about testing this?
According to this document, the Trent XWB from Rolls Royce has a fan diameter of 3m and a reference rotational speed of 2700 rpm for the low pressure stage, which would result in a blade tip speed of 424.1 m/s or 1526.8 km/h according to this calculator
I know that some generator turbines go ~3600 rpm
If my (admittedly super rusty) math is right if we assume a radius of 1 meter which would mean a circumference of ~6.28 meters. In that case the tips of the turbines would be moving:
6.28 * 3600 =22,608 meters per minute.
Please feel free to rip up my math as I’m going on little sleep at the moment.
That manhole cover.
I wonder where that thing is nowadays. Probably landed in the ocean somewhere, or even burned up if it didn't just flat out leave earth orbit.
I'm pretty sure the article iIread said it had more than enough speed to reach escape velocity, but would have ablated/vaporized before doing so.
Depends on how you define everyday life, but there are currently trillions of Neutrinos flying through you at almost light speed. I think their mass still hasn't been measured. But it's pretty low.
The best kind of correct!
Not so long ago I would have said electrons in a CRT screen (old school TV). When the electrons leave the accelerating anode, they are traveling at a reasonable fraction of the speed of light
Yeah but electrons have no mass
I’m stupid, I was thinking of photons.
I think that "with some mass" wasn't meant literally but figuratively, specifically to exclude things like shooting subatomic particles.
I think OP means the kinda of things humans interact with and are able to perceive in their every day life.
Explain to us how we don't interact with electrons in everyday life.
You conveniently skipped over the "and are able to perceive" part
No, I didn't. We can perceive electrons in various ways.
Mantis shrimp punches travel 12 to 23 meters per second (approximately 27 to 51 miles per hour) in water the acceleration involved can reach up to 10,000 Gs.
The peak force generated by a mantis shrimp’s punch can be as high as 1500 Newtons, which is over 2500 times the animal’s own body weight.
The acceleration of their punch is such thay it creates a cavitation bubble which, when it collapses, can generate 8,500 degrees Fahrenheit – nearly as hot as the sun’s surface at 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
We named ours Smeagol.
Kilo-mile per hour is an excellent unit and it should be used more, particularly with respect to insect movement.
Neutrinos. About 100 trillion go through you every second with about .000001 percent interacting with you. And they have a non zero mass.
in everyday life?
It depends if you are in Usa or Ukraine, or in a peaceful country.
Yet another ignorant jingoist
Take your nonsense over to a political sub
Can't find any solid numbers on it, but the micromirrors on a DLP projector are really fast. They rotate 10 degrees or so back and forth something like 1024 times for each color channel for each frame at 60fps.
I'd love to see the acceleration calculations for them.
Tiny masses but insane acceleration.
When uncorking a champagne bottle, the gasses inside expand so fast that the white mist it can usually be seen is actually frozen CO2
This is my high school chemistry talking here, but don't expanding gasses heat up? Ideal gas law and everything? Is there something weird happening like the CO2 instantaneously pressurizing or something right before expanding?
It's the other way around, expanding gasses cool down and compression heats them up.
I remember there being something misleading about the "temperature" in pV=nRT, but yeah, I think I was getting confused because I was thinking about it purely formulaicly.
But if the pressure drops and the volume of the gas increases, in order for it to cool, that would mean the drop in pressure is much less significant than the rise in volume?
But yeah, I should've remembered that expanding gasses cool, because I know how aerosol cans work. It's time to touch up on this stuff lol.
I had a similar conversation with my wife a few weeks ago. We were watching the hydraulic press channel, where they were compressing water to very high pressures. When the water inevitably squirted out of the chamber, it turned to steam. My wife said yeah that makes sense, applying that much energy to compress the water would increase its temperature, so it wants to expand to become steam. Then I thought about it a while, and said wait, according to first principles of thermodynamics, shouldn't compressing water lower it's temperature?! The turns out the real world is correct, I was wrong.
Rudolf Diesel is sure you're wrong.
Hmm how about CRT monitors/televisions? Not that common these days but they are basically little particle accelerators that shoot electrons at a pretty good fraction of the speed of light (like 30%). But I guess that's not really an answer to you question unless you define electrons as objects. I guess my other answer would be airbags which deploy at about 300 kmph
unless you define electrons as objects.
Well, only sometimes.
With mass? In my everyday life? Cars, clearly the winner. I can't think of a more massive object moving at speed that I engage with every day.
Other than that.. Maybe airplanes? I fly once every 1-2 months or so.
Planes are a good answer. Commercial jets normally fly at about 900km/h.
Also satellites. Something in low earth orbit like the ISS or a starlink node would be going about 8km per second.
I rarely use planes, but I usually see them flying overhead multiple times a day.
They're everywhere all the time. Thousands of flights per day carrying millions of people.
I haven't flown in several years, but in some years have taken 100+ flights.
For someone on the US coasts (especially North East) getting anywhere quickly beyond a couple hundred miles will possibly involve a plane.
Gotta go being jingoist. Take your nonsense over to a political sub
Don’t know where you’re saying that. There were over 14,000 gun related deaths in the US in 2025. That’s more than 38/day and that’s not including non-fatal shootings. January 1st saw over 90 deaths alone.
No fewer than 19 people were shot and killed each day in the United States. (One of those least deadly days was in Q4, on November 24).
One of many reports. When you have that many, it very much is a “daily occurrence” in the US.
it didn't happen to me, how dare you say it's hurting people!
The crack of a bullwhip is caused by the tip exceeding the speed of sound, around 750 mph/1250 kph.
How many bullwhips are cracking your general area on an average day?
The whip cracking factory. Duh...
Rockets?
International space station goes around the earth at about 7km/s if I recall correctly. And it's quite big.
That's the kind of speed of any rocket going to meet with ISS or being put into earth orbit. Things reentrying from orbit hit the atmosphere at about that speed too.
Things going or coming to the moon need slightly more, I think ballpark is 10km/s, and above that you're travelling to Mars, asteroids, Venus, Jupiter, etc etc.
I feel like that's even less like "everyday life" than OPs example of bullets lol
I get your point but I'll nitpick anyways:
Isn't satellites as much part of everyday life as submarine internet cables, and our lives would be radically different without satellites but having only submarine cables?
Or do we need to see them to believe it?
Hmmmm that's a good point.
I still wouldn't count that as every day life because you're not physically interacting with the satellite or submarine internet cables, even if you're interacting with the effects of their existence.
But now I have to justify why my stance of "being physically near but still unable to see or touch directly" (as an internal mechanism of something) is any more "everyday life". It feels like an internal mechanism counts as just as every-day as the thing its a part of, but is it really?
I don't have a solid justification. It just feels different to me.
radio waves dont have mass but do have relativistic mass. And you didnt clarify whether relativistic mass counted, so I'm going to go with radio waves. They travel at the speed of light. I am the winner. I'd like my nobel prize in literature now.
Every mass is moving really fast from a certain point of view.
Well then you are lost!
Me, at the end of any social engagement.
It’s like that episode of Simpsons where they’re filming something at the Simpsons’ house and Homer learns there’s snacks. He suddenly becomes a Homer-shaped cloud of dust.
There’s a dirty joke in here somewhere
When you were a kid: The velocity of the adrenaline rushing to your brain triggering a "fight or flight" mode (mostly flight) after you hear the sound of your mother saying your full name in her native dialect.
(Actually the fear remains well into adulthood)
Adrenaline is released from the adrenal glands near the kidneys. From there, it first has to flow back to the heart, through the lungs, then back to the heart, and only then to the brain and the rest of the body. One full loop of your circulation takes about a minute at rest, and half a minute when your heart is really pumping, so lets take at least 20 seconds.
Yes but you haven't heard this guy's mother saying it in her native accent. It really gets the blood flowing.
A skydiver's terminal velocity is about 90m/s (320km/h). Going beyond that requires propulsion.
Otherwise a visit to Japan or China might serve, Maglev trains can reach speeds in excess of 600km/h.
Isn't that for a skydiver who's going feet/head first?
While typical "flying w" is much slower?
(Its been a while since I've read up on it)
Yes it is, but we're going for max speed here :)
In American schools it seems to be bullets
Ah, yes, another jingoist
Take your nonsense over to a political sub
In Japan, everyday life could involve this thing.
Huh. That's disappointing.
China just hit a record with a high speed train that can hit over 700mph in under 2 seconds. They go extremely fast. They break the sound barrier. The front is shaped the way it is so when it enters tunnels, it doesn't blow shit up from the pressure it creates due to its speed.
To be clear, the thing that hit 700 km/h (a different unit from mph) in under 2 seconds was essentially a sled. Not a full train car.
Japanese trains go up to 320 km/h on current lines.
Anyway, the camera movements in the video kinda look sped up too.
Here is the same video without being sped up
Here is a future Japanese bullet train doing 500 km/h if they build out the maglev line.
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Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
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It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
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