Spaceship Earth is an Epcot classic that takes guests on a journey through the history of communication.
It is one of the many attractions that makes use of the popular omnimover ride system,
and we know that it travels at a rate of around 1.2 miles per hour, or 1.9 km/h.
But what I want to know is, how fast through time does it travel?
That’s right.
How fast through time do you travel on Spaceship Earth?
The ride takes us from the era of prehistoric hunting all the way to the birth of personal
computing and then back to the present, all in the span of about 15 minutes.
I rode the attraction a few times and put together a spreadsheet to find the answer.
It of course varies wildly from scene to scene, but the average speed worked out to 186 and
a half years per second.
Now before I dive into the specifics of that speed and the very very wide range that makes
up that average, I want to preface this video with how I put all these numbers together.
In general, I measured the breaks in scenes when Dame Judi Dench starts talking about
that scene.
So when she starts talking about ancient Egypt, that’s when the progression towards the
Phoenicians begins, and when we get there the progression towards Ancient Greece begins,
and so on and so forth.
Since the speed of the ride can change depending on slow-downs for guests who need help getting
on and off the attraction, I rode it a few different times and averaged out the durations.
Lastly, to get the dates used to measure this time travel, I turned to one of my favorite
unofficial Disney World books, A Historical Tour of Walt Disney World Volume 2 by Andrew Kiste.
For full disclosure, I am not being paid to promote this book.
This isn’t a sponsorship.
I’m just a fan of Andrew’s work and it was the first place I thought to turn to for the dates.
His book take a historical look at Disney attractions and for Spaceship Earth he went
through every scene and used context clues within the scenes to make as accurate of an
estimation as possible as to when they took place.
In instances where he estimated a range of years, I ran the numbers from the centerpoint
of that range.
So all that said, let’s dive in.
We start Spaceship Earth in the present, 2019, and over the course of 132.5 seconds, we travel
back to the Paleolithic Era, more specifically to around 59,000 BCE.
To get to that date I actually had to work backwards.
The following scene is the introduction of cave paintings.
The earliest known cave paintings are said to have happened between 40 and 52 thousand years ago.
Dame Judy Dence says in the script that it occurred 15,000 years after the initial hunting scene.
So if we split the difference to 46,000 years ago, and add 15,000 years, you end up with
61,000 years ago or just about 59,000 BCE.
Going that far back in just a little over two minutes puts our initial speed at 460 years per second.
From there it only takes 24 seconds to reach the cave painting scene.
That bumps up our speed through time to 625 years per second.
But that’s nothing, because 18 seconds later we arrive in Ancient Egypt to the creation
of papyrus, which Kiste pins at around 3,000 BCE.
That 41,000 year change in just 18 seconds comes out to a speed through time of 2279
years per second.
This is where we see the first major slowdown however, as our development of communication
speeds up.
The 43 seconds it takes to reach the famous Phonecian scene, estimated to take place at
around 925 BCE, drops our speed down to 48 years per second.
From the Phonecians to Greece, it drops again down to 22 years per second, and from Greece
to Rome 10.4 years per second.
Heading to the burning of the Library of Alexandria bumps it back up to 23 years per second.
This was particularly interesting.
As Kiste notes in his book, the library had actually burned more than once, and he uses
the previous scene and the script to estimate that it was the burning in the year 640 that
we’re seeing on the ride.
As we move on to the Middle East and their translated backup copies, we move forward
to 1382, which ups our speed again to 51 years per second.
Now this might seem like cheating, but Dench uses the world “meanwhile” to transition
to the monk scene, implying that time itself isn’t actually passing much.
So I guess we drop to 0 years per second?
It would mostly line up with when monks were hand copying texts and, you know, sleeping
on the job.
We then move on to the printing press in 1439, which slows us down to 3.8 years per second.
Then to the Renaissance.
The Renaissance spanned hundreds of years, but the last bit we see is Michelangelo working
on the Sistine Chapel, which occurred between 1508 and 1512.
This puts our time travel speed at 4.9 years per second.
That jumps up to 9.6 years per second as we head forward to the end of the Civil War over
the course of 37 seconds.
One of the shortest progressions is then to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad
which happened just four years later.
That puts our speed at 0.15 years per second.
From here, things really start to compress.
4.6 years per second to the phones of the 1920's.
0.9 years per second to Jesse Owens at the Olympics.
3.4 years per second to the moon landing, and then 0.18 years per second to that generic
1970's computer scene.
I’ll be honest, for that I just split the difference between the scene before and after it.
Finally we drop down to 0.16 years per second to get to home computing.
From the “home computer that is definitely not an Apple because it would involve using
a brand name” scene we then head into the Matrix.
So, like…
1999?
The future?
I’m not sure Disney, you kind of lost me with that one.
So instead I just assumed that from the “not-Apple” scene we start our return to the present.
The 338.5 second trip takes us from 1976 back to 2019.
That long journey paired with the short distance in time gives us our slowest speed yet, at
just 0.13 years per second.
What’s also interesting is that time obviously continues.
So if I ran these numbers again next year, that initial and final trip would be extended
by 0.007 years per second.
All of these speeds averaged out?
186.5 years per second.
So there you have it.
Admittedly it’s a strange way to look at Spaceship Earth but it's one I've been thinking
about for some time.
And while I think it’s obviously not as apparent as the scenes themselves, I found
the changes in the speed to be an interesting way to look at just how quickly we started
to progress as a society.
For a slow ride, Spaceship Earth moves pretty fast.