I'd like to believe that mass (and then by extension the Earth) "defines" the spacetime around it as much as it distorts spacetime near it. I suspect this may even be the underlying cause for the observation of speed of light being constant in the presence of earth/solar/galactic movement.
When I was a kid I thought that spacetime was created by mass. I thought that if you were to ever find the end of the universe you wouldn't be able to travel beyond because you would just create new spacetime everywhere you went.
And I thought that was scientific consensus. No idea where I got it from, though.
My view has always been that space is "round", that there is no end of the universe because it just loops back around. Apparently this is all still unknown.
It'd be really interesting if time moves at different speeds in different bits of the galaxy, find out that none of the other solar systems have life because closer to the galactic center of someone dropped a teapot when the first life evolved on earth it still wouldn't have hit the floor.
Of course there's a lot of reasons this isn't the case but I dismiss them by saying they're all just an effect of distortion due to time variance.
Maybe we'll get s message from voyager saying 'arrived at a star 224 light years away, it was super quick because there's no time in the middle so you just skip that bit'
Similar to a solar system's habitable zone there exists (or is suspected to exist) a galactic habitable zone. I think because of cosmic rays and radiation. So I guess most habitable planets would have more or less the same time dilation.