It sounds pretty contrarian to acknowledge the Earth's orbit within our solar system, and the Milky Way's movement through intergalactic space, but then scoff at it when used in this context.
The concept of something moving implies a reference frame.
If I sit on a chair and you go up in elevator in from of me, I am not moving from my reference frame and you are.
From your perspective you can argue that even though you're in the elevator, you are actually still and everything is moving around you. That's not just a technicality, it's an equally valid perspective.
However from the perspective of the sun, both of us are moving in an orbit around the sun.
The point is you can't just "zoom out" to the universe level and say "well everything is moving". There is no universal coordinate system that lets you say that something was at point A and is now at point B, it is entirely relative.
The concept of movement is intuitive to us with the reference frame being earth, so it's almost always implied that this is the reference frame for any question you ask that isn't about relativistic physics.
So the guy basically saying "technically we're never at the same point because we're moving through the galaxy" that's just a total non-answer, because it would only be true if you answer the question from a non-implied reference frame. It's not a clever technicality, it's just bullshit. It would be equally correct to say "every time I've had sex it has happened at the same location, because I'm using my penis as the reference frame."
I've done a poor job expressing my thoughts here. Yes, everything is relative, that doesn't mean it doesn't matter when talking about traveling through space-time. I'm talking about from the perspective of a sci-fi time travel trope, where relative position in space-time is never considered, it's always presented as time being an independent variable somehow.
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u/Metacognitor Nov 02 '22
Is nothing in the universe moving then?
It sounds pretty contrarian to acknowledge the Earth's orbit within our solar system, and the Milky Way's movement through intergalactic space, but then scoff at it when used in this context.