how weird it is that there is no absolute ground

5 days ago by Aniki to c/showerthoughts

i just find it really weird that there is no fixed ground. the planet Earth is moving through space, at an arbitrary velocity, depending on what you compare it to. if you push hard enough, you can make the earth's speed change, in fact you could even split the planet up into pieces. there is no fixed, absolute ground. it's not even "turtles all the way down". if you dig down deep enough, you get out the other side, and there's just nothingness. it's so weird that we're all built on nothingness. we're excitations of the void. in fact, nothing can ever be kept constant because there's no fixed ground to anchor it on. we're like a dream that's constantly volatile, always evolving, in fact we cannot even stop time right now at all.

Astronut 23 points 4 days ago

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving

And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour

It's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned

A sun that is the source of all our power

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see

Are moving at a million miles a day

In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour

Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars

It's a hundred thousand light years side to side

It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light years thick

But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide

We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point

We go round every two hundred million years

And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions

In this amazing and expanding universe…

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kambusha 14 points 4 days ago

And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space

’Cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth!

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mech 2 points 4 days ago

Can we have your liver, then?

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Munkisquisher 2 points 3 days ago

How about spam, eggs, sausage and spam?

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Astronut 2 points 4 days ago

Making you some Liver and onions are ya!

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myrmidex 4 points 5 days ago

I reckon the no-absolute-ground feels so natural because we originally came from the sea.

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Krauerking 2 points 4 days ago

Well I mean it could be turtles all the way down.

But yeah isnt it wild that everything is basically in a suspended net with each other and that each little vibration technically impacts the whole thing even if it is so small it is hard to notice? We are all trapped in here together, even the planets and stars we see. Holding onto each other as much as they can to not just drift apart.

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bigbangdangler 2 points 4 days ago

It gets better when you consider that the "ground" itself, and indeed all matter, is just mostly empty space anyway.

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Mowcherie 1 point 3 days ago

People get around that by defining a reference point as the fixed ground and thinking about things relative to that. To create direction and order and gain understanding of a system.

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Mowcherie 1 point 3 days ago

People get around that by defining a reference point as the fixed ground and thinking about things relative to that. To create direction and order and gain understanding of a system.

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