Stay rule

"but Stephen, there are no fixed points in space. Space is relative, meaning you can only define positions relative to other things. You demand the fundamentally physically impossible of me, Stephen."
- We're currently unaware of any fixed coordinate system for space itself. There may be one, we have no basis of reference for it.
- Ah, but using the cosmic microwave background we actually can determine a universal coordinate system to fix a point in space.
  
  cosmic microwave
  Oh, so that's why Earth is spinning!
  
  that sounds like you're relating your position to something else 😏
  
  But only related to the cosmic microwave background, which, while more universal than most other reference frames, is ultimately still arbitrary
  
  Why cosmic microwave background radiation? Is that any less arbitrary than e.g. the sun?
- Is it tho? Assuming there was a big bang, isnt it fair to call that origin point 0 0 0 in 3D space? Subjective space is relative, but that doesnt mean space itself is relative.
  
  that's not how the big bang works, the whole thing about the big bang is that it was a singularity containing all of space in a single point.
  The standard analog is to take a small balloon with dots painted on it, then inflating it. The surface of the balloon is spacetime, and as it shows there is no origin, everything just gets more distant from everything else.
  
  the big bang wasn't an explosion from a point, it was an explosion of a point in space. That one point is still expanding to this day. Everything is moving away from everything else, which wouldn't be the case in an "ordinary" explosion. We are all still in that one point, it's just that that point has expanded. The center of the universe is, in the literal sense of the word "literally", everywhere.
  
  So from wherever you look, the universe is expanding away from you (I.e., other things in it move away from you).
  Therefore, you can see that the universe doesn't have a centre. From this and some other a bit more complicated things, one can see that the Big Bang never had a single point but rather expanded everywhere at once when it happend. Although often called expansion from one point that is wrong.
  Also technically you would need to give a time dimension as we live in 4D space.
  
  the 0 0 0 0 (spacetime) orientation system would be possible if the universe was a minkowski space and thus flat, but spacetime is curvy due to relativistic effects, which prevents any sort of flat orientation like that
  
  I'm so glad you asked that.
  
  Think of a balloon expanding. All the dots on the surface are moving away from one another. No dot is the centre.
  
  The big bang created the universe within space. Space is literally, just space, an endless empty (as far as we know) vacuum.
  
  I'm just going to jump on the bandwagon and helpfully say; think of the universe as a large expanding paper bag.
  Initially it was flat, but then the bagger expanded it in the third dimension and put bananas in it. Imagine now that you are one of those bananas, but oh no, here comes the 2L Pepsi bottle ready to crush us. Thankfully the bagger takes us out of the bag first, puts the cola bottle in, and then puts us back in on top.
  And that's why I believe in God
- Out of my depth here, but it seems that objective timespace coordinates can be determined while still meshing with relativity.
  I'll just leave this here so someone else can explain why I'm wrong:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time
  I know 4D spacetime can be non-euclidean, but I believe those are localized to areas experiencing relativistic extrema.
  
  Proper time is only defined along a timelike world line, e.g. the timeline of a specific reference point / object. It's "objective" in the sense that is true for the reference point, but other reference points may (for example) perceive distant events in a different order

Good one!

I studied general relativity last year and ACKCHYUALLY...
- The earth is rotating, which is a non-inertial reference frame. Fido simply uses its own reference frame, which following the command is now inertial. The result is that Fido is no longer affected by gravity, and slowly floats away just as in the comic
  
  good boy fido
- Pfft! I read about it on a box of cereal 5 minutes ago and think I've come to some novel conclusions.
  
  that's a rad box of cereal

I KNEW YOU THOUGHT I WAS GOOD DOG!!!

This makes me sad.
Also, it's a little inaccurate as the dog would be moving at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour, either burning up in the Earth's atmosphere or plowing through its surface. Also, I don't think dogs have the ability to do this, so there's that.
- We have never truly tested the limits of dogs. Only the limits of what THEY think we want.
  
  What they want is to be with us, thus they would never use such a power even if they had it.

because fixed points in space (stationary reference frames) fall inwards into gravity wells as time progresses, Fido, would need to burrow into the center of the earth. Fido should shoot into space like that if told to stay at a fixed point relative to the cosmic microwave background