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.
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.
Are planes part of your daily life?
I use planes maybe once every thee years.
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 massI’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.
You can perceive high speed electrons in various ways, in your every day life?
Ok, that level of pedantry is my job
That’s not what pedantry means.
The effects of subatomic particles, even high speed ones, are apparent even if you are unaware of the cause.
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?
The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.
- Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
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.
Every mass is moving really fast from a certain point of view.
Well then you are lost!
Neutrinos. About 100 trillion go through you every second with about .000001 percent interacting with you. And they have a non zero mass.
The crack of a whip is a sonic boom caused by the tip going supersonic.
Some sex includes supersonic elements, then.
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
🎵 I wanna make a supersonic man out of you 🎶
grabs pool queue
I don’t think that those people waiting in line to go swimming wanted to be grabbed.
Kill the Queen
Gotta go fast
Glass cracks propagate at an absurdly fast rate. Something like 4x the speed of sound (1400m/s). Not a physical thing moving, but very common.
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
I think it would propagate at the speed of sound in glass.
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.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/sound-speed-solids-d_713.html
Interesting… how do you know about this?
Slow Mo Guys on YouTube have filmed glass cracking and calculated its speed many times. Very lovely channel that I recommend!
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.
You’re mixing cause and effect.
The effect of lowering temperature is shrinking gases. If you force a gas to shrink it will increase temperature.
I’ll just go with the correct answer: Cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays have mass?
They sure do, and they’re randomly flipping bits in your computer’s memory once in a while.
Nooooo, dont do that, I’m busy speed running Mario64
Yes.
There’s a dirty joke in here somewhere
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.
Most likely never went far before it vaporized.
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.
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)
There are quite a few bullets capable of >4,000 feet per second (or 2,700 mph, or 1,220 m/s or 4,390 kph).
You could call them an everyday occurrence if you live in the US
Gotta go being jingoist.
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.
We’re a country of a third of a billion, so even as astronomically high as 19/day is, it by no means makes it an everyday occurrence for every single one of us.
it didn’t happen to me, how dare you say it’s hurting people!
hur dur dur I didn’t read the context hurrrrr
What a strange way to use the word jingoist.
That’s what kids learn in applied physics class
Why? What are you planning?
For the future (most plans are). /j
I was planning on getting information (mostly useless and anecdotal to me).
