as small as a world and as large as alone

6:34pm March 16, 2013

dduane:

mercuriesrising:

vantasticmess:

w-for-wumbo:

I am so glad someone made this cuz I’ve always wondered how the movement of the solar system might look as a whole….

BUT LOOK HOW EPIC THE SOLAR SYSTEM IS GUYS

PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY WE’RE NEVER IN THE SAME PLACE ONCE.

I WASN’T FUCKING KIDDING.

…

Dairine’s frame of reference suddenly became huger than the whole Earth and the space that contained it, so that her planet seemed only one moving, whirling point plunging along its path through a terrible complexity of forces, among which gravity was a puny local thing and not to be regarded. …Earth spins at seventeen thousand miles an hour, plows along its orbital path at a hundred seventy-five thousand; and the Sun takes it and the whole Solar System off toward the constellation Hercules at a hundred fifteen thousand miles an hour. Then the Sun’s motion as one of innumerable stars in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy sweeps it along at some two million miles an hour, and all the while relationships between individual stars, and those of stars to their planets, shift and change.

It all meant that any one person standing still on any planet was in fact traveling a crazed, corkscrewing path through space, at high speed: and the disorientation and sickness [of personal worldgating travel] were apparently the cause of suddenly, and for the first time, going in a straight line, in a universe where space itself and everything in it is curved….

(High Wizardry, 1990)

o_O

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