Hey Al, we can agree on something!

Brain teaser: If we could cancel the velocity of our Sun, the gravitational pull from the center of the galaxy would pull us in. How long would it take to reach the center of the galaxy?

My calculations suggest 3.2 billion years! But the Sun takes 'only' 226 million years to make one orbit about the galactic center. What gives?

The whole assumption is invalid. The only way to cancel the velocity of the sun is to destroy it. It's riding galactic lines of force that keep it all moving like gears in a watch. Once the sun would be destroyed--we would never make it to the center of the galaxy because our planet(s) would break up in short order and we would experience all sorts of collisions with solar objects--first our moon and then the asteroid belt. The earth would soon be indistinguishable from the asteroids that hit us.

And if that didn't take us out of there in the first month or two, we would follow these lines of force for awhile until something did--not make a beeline for the center of the galaxy. The earth might last for a few years at best before it ended up as a bunch of asteroids.

One of the things that keeps the earth's magnetic field strong is this rotation around the sun. We carry a charge from it. Without the sun our magnetic field would be a fraction of its normal strength. When it weakens we will lose our resistance to certain types of collisions that were repelled based upon charge and polarity of magnetic fields.

Might as well ask how many birthdays a man would celebrate on a journey to Toliman.