If we all feel a little giddy at times there's a good reason for it: we are all spinning at 1670 kmh, or slightly less, depending on our proximity to the equator.
However, speed is always relative and that's why there's no human perception of our planet's rotational rate, nor our planet's astonishing velocity of 107,226kmh through space as it orbits the sun.
And yet we sit in amazement at the pace of Usain Bolt, the fastest human alive, and recognise he is is fast because electronic timing equipment has told us this is so.
Bolt's top speed of 44.64kmh recorded in Berlin in 2014 is seen as the fastest official speed recorded over the 100m distance, even though US sprinter Justin Gatlin ran slightly faster, illegally propelled along by giant fans for a Japanese game show gimmick in 2011.
However, the speed of which human are capable pales in comparison with those of the natural world.
The Peregrine falcon is the fastest animal on earth, but it "cheats" by using gravity assist for its high speed hunting.
A Peregrine falcon named Frightful achieved a dive speed of 389 kmh in a 1999 experiment.
This raptor is tailor-made for a screaming dive. It has powerful flight muscles, stiff feathers and can shape its body like a bullet. To keep its eyes lubricated during the dive, it has a third eyelid - a nictitating membrane - that sweeps across its eyes to clear away tiny specs of dust and debris, and a bony tubercle in its eye sockets that act like goggles.
Under the water, scientists generally agree that the fastest creature is the sailfish, one of which took 91 metres of line in three seconds off Florida, the equivalent of 109kmh. Others, like the black marlin and the Mako shark, are slightly less speedy.
Little is known about needle-nosed sailfish because they are generally solitary and so difficult to study but video footage revealed they fold back their fins completely to achieve high speed when hunting, and like the falcon using impact speed as a primary shock weapon, stunning their prey.
For speed across the ground, the cheetah makes Usain Bolt look pedestrian.
A key asset to the hunting strategy of the cheetah is it can accelerate from rest to around 100kmh in around three seconds and achieve a top speed around 120kmh.
Consider for a moment, too, that's a slightly better rate of acceleration than the fastest Top Fuel drag car in the world (Brittany Force in 2022 at the US National Hot Rod Association Nationals with a quarter-mile pass of 3.665secs).
And before the nit-pickers jump in, the quickest pass by any drag car over that distance was set almost 20 years ago at Santa Pod Raceway by Sammy Miller's rocket-powered Vanishing Point, with 3.58secs.
What's not well known however, is that in September this year a group of Swiss students broke the world record for acceleration with their hand-built electric racing car. It accelerated from rest to 100kmh in just 0.956 seconds, achieving this velocity over a distance of merely 12.3 metres.
Built of carbon and aluminium honeycomb and powered by hub motors on all four wheels, the race car weighs 140 kilograms and uses a vaccuum cleaner effect which effectively sucks it to the tarmac for optimum traction.
Just as there's little human perception of speed when travelling in an aircraft at high altitude, there can be little doubt that astronauts being launched from earth into space would be well aware of the thrust propelling them upward, given that the necessary escape velocity from our planet's gravity well is around 11.2 kilometres per second.
Astronauts have been hitting astonishing speeds for many years, with the crew of Apollo 10 hitting a record 39,937kmh, or just over 32 times the speed of sound, on their return trajectory to earth in 1969. This orbital flight around the moon was a so-called "dress rehearsal" for the subsequent moon landing flight of Apollo 11.
The ablative heat shield on Apollo reached around 2760 degrees Celcius, melting away as the crew module re-entered the earth's atmosphere.
