Earth may have had a ring system 466 million years ago | Hacker News Reader

Earth may have had a ring system 466 million years ago

monash.edu

54 pointsgeox26 comments

At the rate we are going with quantities of satellites and orbiting space junk we just might get new rings due to the Kessler Syndrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

There is a disproportionate amount of LEO satellites in polar orbits. Particularly morning time sun-synchronous polar orbits.

If everything in that orbit (the most crowded one) starts kessler syndroming it up, I think all the junk would mostly stay in polar orbits?

Can any orbital dynamics experts confirm? I was kind of just adjacent to that area in a job previously.

Probably? I don't think masscons are big enough of an influence, but what timescales are you talking about?

The Starlink satellites have a design lifespan of about 5 years and will reenter the atmosphere relatively quickly even if not actively maneuvering, simply by virtue of being so close to Earth.

If we ever meet any aliens with both FTL ships and a SGL telescope, they are going to have some amazing photos to show us.

(now there's a sci-fi plot, feel free to steal that one)

There is such a sci-fi plot. Unfortunately, I don't recall the story's title or the author. What I do recall was the use of gravitational lensing (a neutron star) to observe an alien world in the years just before the alien's home star went nova.

Yes! It says the rings would have caused a cooling effect. Vindication that my mad science plan of giving the Earth an artificial ring system to combat climate change is viable!

So how many years of cooling does blowing up the moon give us?

The moon is pretty reflective... If the rings were oriented just right it might actually mirror lots of light that would have missed earth and bounce it down to ground. Possible it would heat the earth.

My suggestion is not to blow up the moon, but to launch payloads from earth via nuclear pulse propulsion containing extremely low albedo material, like coal dust, and create an artificial ring that way.

-Future historians were baffled by the extinction of 99% of life on earth after the planet inexplicably became surrounded by a cloud of radioactive soot. Monuments were discovered exclaiming "at least we're not speaking German"

I really want to see an artist’s rendition of what this would’ve looked like from the surface.

ask copilot or midjourney or ... ?

You are in luck :)

https://www.cnet.com/culture/if-earth-had-rings-like-saturn-...

That doesn't look right... if the rings were around the Equator, why are they perpendicular to the surface in a picture of the US Capitol?!

You can see a lot of the side of the rings, which means they are offset by a large distance, perhaps to the equator. Doesn't look too bad to my eye.

They're not perpendicular in that picture. They're foreshortened - the one dark gap in the rings is narrower towards the horizon (farther away from the observer). The view is about right - the apparent altitude of the highest point of the rings would be 90º minus your latitude, so about 52º above the horizon from DC, which is roughly what that image is showing (we can't really tell the field-of-view span angle from a single pic.)

What's actually wrong is the orientation relative to the Capitol. The highest point of equatorial rings would be due south, and that's at the right edge of the image, so the center of the image is oriented so that we're looking roughly southeast. But we're looking almost directly at one wall, and the rectangular building is oriented to the cardinal directions, so that can't be southeast.

I think it would look something like that if you were looking directly east, since the distance and the perspective would bring it to the vanishing point in the center of the image.

So, from that POV, the rings would not be able to go past the center of the image.

This view would still be possible if this is a cropped down section of a larger image that was pointed slightly to the left I think.

I recommend a video by Joe Scott[1] that explores this What If scenario. He created renders showing what rings may look like from Earth and from Space. He also went into details such as how seasons may have been impacted, or how the night sky wouldn't be as dark because of the sun's reflections.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUztyRYQ5iU

It also may have had intelligent life around then, too. It might not have.

As Monty Python once said: "And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth."

> Earth may have had a ring system 466 million years ago

The pigs may have flown 466 million years ago. /s

no one channeling beyonce? that's how you know this isn't reddit. :)

It may have had, it may not have had.

someone might have rung, someone might not have

There a lot of "stories" like those lately. Looks like failed writers who could not make their way into publishing. Instead they are creating "what if" stories.

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