What Would Happen If The Earth Had Rings?

this is planet Earth and this is Saturn and while Earth has a lot of things going for it liquid water life the pypy Civic Center it's Saturn that's considered the Jewel of the solar system probably because it has actual jewelry it has a ring on it but Saturn's not alone turns out all the gas giants in the solar system have rings so do some dwarf planets like hamea Charo and corar it's also thought that someday Mars will have rings and a lot of scientists believe that there's another planet that used to have rings Earth guys the Earth used to have rings so I Came Upon that little fact and I've just kind of been obsessed with it ever since then you know like like what what would that look like what would that mean what if they were still here to find the answer I took a deep deep dive into this topic devouring research consulted with other Earth and space YouTubers even reached out to one of the world's foremost planetary Rings experts and then I hired an award-winning visual effects artist to put together what I hope to be the single most scientifically accurate look at what what the world would be like if the Earth still had rings so before we talk about how a ring system around Earth would work maybe we should start by talking about how rings work in the first place rings are simply put thousands and millions of tiny little rock and ice particles from the size of a grain of sand up to Small moons moonlets if you will these usually stem from some kind of collision or gravitational forces tearing a moon apart or sometimes an asteroid or a large comet yeah in a way rings are BAS just like a giant debris field that never quite falls down in fact you can see in this animation of a satellite Collision that took place in 2009 how the various debris Fields kind of spread out into long thin lines as it continues to orbit around the Earth forming temporarily anyway a kind of ring the physics of why the Rings flatten out and usually settle around the equator are very complicated has a lot to do with angular momentum and gravitational frames in fact it's so complicated that we're still learning things about it yeah I mentioned earlier that some dwarf planets have rings well the one around Kar was just discovered this last February U corar is a dwarf planet in the Kyper belt but it ring really made astronomer's heads explode because it kind of breaks all the rules like it was thought that Rings could only exist really close up to a planetary body because of the tidal forces that stop them from clumping up but kar's rings are like twice as far out as they should be by the way I mentioned earlier that Mars may have rings one day that's because its Moon Phobos is slowly moving closer to the planet and about 50 million years or so it'll get close enough for Mars's gravity to break it apart so that's one way that rings can form another way that rings can form is from massive collisions which brings us back to Earth as you're probably well aware the most accepted theory of how the moon was formed is the Thea giant impact hypothesis which says a collision between Earth and a protoplanet named Thea created the moon but before the moon there were Rings they formed from the debris that got launched into orbits some of which got sucked into the moon some of it fell back to Earth but it's thought that the Rings lasted for Millennia but what if they were still around what if during the entire hist history of the Earth the origin of Life The Dinosaurs the entire history of humanity and civilization the sky was adorned with rings how would things be different how would we be different let's start with exactly how these Rings would look uh first of all they wouldn't look like Saturn's rings Saturn's rings are a mixture of rock and Ice lots of ice actually that's why they're so shiny but Earth Rings wouldn't have all that ice simply because we're too close to the Sun our Rings would be more Rocky and Dusty uh wouldn't be quite as shiny as the icy rings of Saturn but they would still be pretty shiny because they're so close according to Columbia University director of astrobiology Caleb sharf the moon only reflects 12% of light from the sun which is kind of amazing when you think about how bright a full moon is but he took that basically as a starting point he speculated what a ring system would look like if it only reflected 10% of sunlight and in a live science article he said quote about 1300 watts of sunlight per square meter hits the top of our atmosphere so 10% of that would produce as much as 130 Wat light bulb that's per square meter so he mentions the top of the atmosphere because there is a certain point under which there's enough atmosphere that it would create drag and eventually drag the Rocks you know into the planet and turn it into a meteor basically that levels at about 1,000 km and that's good news for satellites most of the satellites we put up there uh including the ISS that's all below the Thousand km Mark um some you know geostationary satellites would have to go up past that um we'll get into all that here in a minute so the Rings would start at about th000 km above sea level how far they could go out uh in theory they could go out to the RO limit the RO limit is basically the minimum distance that an object can approach a planet before the gravity of that planet tears it apart like I mentioned earlier that the Mars Moon Phobos is going to eventually turn into rings that's because it will eventually hit the RO limit so the deal is outside the roach limit objects and debris will Clump up into small moons and this is actually what happened to IR Moon enough debris from the Thea Collision went outside the RO limit and it just mooned up okay so calculating the RO limit for Earth is pretty complicated it depends on a lot of different factors but in some of the research that I did I found that a general rule of thumb for comets anyway is 2.8 Earth radi meaning that a passing Comet will shatter if it gets inside 2.8 Earth radi or about 17880 km but I ran this past a couple of astronomers including friend of the channel Christen ready from Launchpad astronomy and the consensus seems to be that our Rocky Rings would probably have a little bit tighter roach limit than an icy comet would putting it somewhere around say 15,000 km so roughly speaking Earth's Rings would exist in a kind of ring zone between 1,000 and 15,000 km above the surface most likely anchored above the equator where the orbital speed is highest now depending on how the Rings form they could take up a little bit or all of that zone um if say it was just a captured asteroid or a comet it might just be a thin ring and it could exist anywhere inside that zone but that's not how the Earth got its rings back in the day IR Rings came from a cataclysmic collision between two planets that is not a small amount of debris so in our case our Rings would have been big and full kind of more like Saturn's rings just out there just spinning like a record baby right round round round so with all those factors in mind our ringed Earth would look something like [Music] [Music] this [Music] now all that's beautiful but obviously we wouldn't experience the Rings from that outside Vantage Point not very often anyway we would experience them from the ground and that experience would vary depending on where you are on Earth from the equator it would barely look like rings at all you would just see a line from one horizon to the opposite Horizon As you move away from the equator say Mexico City the Rings would widen and Arc across the sky to the South taking up a large section of the sky moving further north than New York and you probably wouldn't see the bottom of the Rings at all due to the curvature of the earth they would just exist in a permanent rainbow across the southern sky and as you approach the North Pole the Rings would barely be visible if they're visible at all they would just exist basically as a permanent Twilight effect the Rings would be visible at all times of the day um barring overcast Skies of course but it's at night when it gets really interesting because like imagine the brightness of the full moon but way closer and like all the way across the sky you you never really have night like we have now but again that depends on where you are back at the equator You' just see a bright line from one horizon to the other giving you mostly the same views you'd get now depending on the time of year which we'll get to in a second same goes for the poles which would be almost identical to the sky above the poles right now with their long periods of light and dark but in the middle to the upper latitudes that's where you get a real show nighttime in these areas would be so bright you might not even need headlights on cars the Rings would dominate the sky and far outshine the moon which would appear like a dull Dark Orb in contrast with the Rings the Rings would be by far the defining feature of the night sky but the defining feature of the Rings would be the Earth shadow in fact you never see the full rings at night as the sun sets in the west the Earth's Shadow would begin to appear in the East slowly moving across the sky throughout the night so that by the time it disappears on the western Horizon the sun would begin to light up the sky in the East again this would make timekeeping at night super easy because you'd be able to tell with a just a quick glance but where the shadow is across the Rings what time it is you know again barring an overcast sky and that shadow would vary greatly according to the seasons from the summer to Winter Solstice you'd see the Earth's Shadow grow taking up more and more of the Rings thanks to that 23.5° tilt of the Earth as it moves around the Sun but it's not just the Earth's rings on the shadow that would change throughout the seasons it's also the ring shadow on the earth and this is actually a much more important thing to talk about cuz those Rings would make the seasons vastly more extreme with hotter Summers and way colder Winters because in the Summers the sun would shine directly on say the Northern Hemisphere but the southern hemisphere would be shrouded in darkness and as the Earth moves around the Sun the opposite would become true meaning we would have very dark Winters that last up to 6 months now granted it might not be nighttime dark it's doubtful the Rings would block all the light but it would serve like a almost like a window tint over the Earth just reducing the amount of light hitting the surface less light and less Heat leading to brutally cold Winters and possibly warmer Summers because you wouldn't just be getting the light from the sun you'd be getting all that light reflected off of the Rings as well in fact there might be like a moving band across the Earth where the reflection off the Rings would basically Focus the light in one spot making it extremely intense from the ground it could almost look like two suns in the sky creating a Tatooine effect now around the equator youd probably start to see some really crazy effects in the spring and fall because as those Rings go more Edge on the amount of light being blocked would increase and the Shadows would become darker meaning that people living in the shadow would basically be in permanent night for a couple of months so right on the equator as the year goes by you'd see the sun move in that familiar analemma Figure 8 with the sun crossing the Rings at the spring and Autumn Equinox further north in Mexico City things get more interesting with the typical summer and fall leading to a dark Long 15we Winter with the Sun going behind the rings around the end of October and not coming back out until the middle of February it would be a similar situation in New York except due to the higher latitude the sun would only spend 8 weeks behind the Rings going behind around the 23rd of November and emerging around the 18th of January meaning Mexico City would actually have a longer and darker winter than New York though the already colder temperatures in New York would make their Dark Days much more brutal so yeah a ringed Earth would be pretty it would make for some pretty fantastic landscape portraits but it would make a very significant impact on the world like living on a ringed Earth would would just be very different from what we're used to now of course if we evolved there you know we'd think nothing of it we'd not only be used to it we would have been created by it like our circadian rhythms would be vastly different to deal with the very bright Summers and very very long dark Winters uh plants and animals might be stouter and chunkier to kind of deal with the long cold months we might be a bit more bit more stocky now we can only speculate how we and other plants and animals would evolve differently on a ringed Earth but the real fun speculation comes when you start thinking about how these Rings would affect our culture yeah what are all the different ways we'll find to kill each other over these Rings it would be immense I mean like just think about how much the Moon is influenced culture and that's just a dot in the sky like I'm releasing this video on a Monday it's the middle of the month people tend to get a little crazier around full moons that's why we call crazy people lunatics the Moon is all over our art and our literature even our religion the presence of rings that would be brighter and more constant than the moon would dominate all three speaking of the Moon would that mess up the Rings turns out this is a topic of much debate cuz on one hand the Moon is way way further away than the Rings are the Moon is 400,000 km away that's much further away than 15,000 but the moon does still exert a gravitational force in the planet I mean just look at the tides but again oceans of water are a vastly different medium than in a Ian disc of particulate dust orbiting in space I mean just look at all the satellites that we've launched around the earth and they're not affected by the moon's gravity so in my research for this video I ran across a scientific paper from 2016 titled planetary ring Dynamics from boltzman equation to Celestial mechanics by astronomer Pierre EES longer ready and so uh yeah I reached out to him and he was kind enough to respond to me and one of his initial concerns was um the difference between the orbital plane of the Rings versus the orbital plane of the Moon because as my shirt illustrates here the Earth is tilted at 23.5° but the moon orbits on the same plane as the Earth orbit around the sun meaning it's not lined up with the Equator the way that the Rings would be so let's just say this little ball here is the Moon it would be orbiting in this direction and when it's on this side of the planet it would pull down on the Rings where it's on this side of the planet it would pull up on the Rings this is not in proportion whatsoever it would actually be like way out here my arm's not long enough the point is this could over hundreds of millions of years be a destabilizing force on the Rings especially if the Rings were created during the Thea Collision this might be why they're not around anymore because the moon was a lot closer back then and would have had a stronger effect on them so one could make the argument that in order for us to have the Rings we couldn't have a moon but then you get into the whole debate as to whether or not life could have even formed on the earth without the stabilizing effect of the Moon over the years see yeah it's a complicated question at the very least the moon would have disrupted the Rings a little bit to cause like Spokes and spikes in the Rings kind of like what we see on Saturn anyway back to culture some of the earliest prehistoric structures that we found tend to be astronomical in nature often observing dates like the summer solstice like I did a video earlier this year on this place called the Chio archo astronomical complex um it's a prime example of structures meant to Mark the position of the sun and I think you can see a similar kind of building and observation of the the days that the Sun goes behind the Rings and when it comes back out um especially since those Mark the transition from drastically different seasons for our ringed Earth people you know they might see the Rings as a kind of road or in between World between life and death like that's where you go where you die and and if they worship the Sun that day might be the day that the sun god takes in all the souls of those who died in the last year you could expect that cultures would be really divided along latitude lines because of how differently they would experience the Rings they might also observe the dates when the Rings disconnect and then reconnect in the night sky because of their Shadow breaking them up the Rings might be the the land of the Gods if the moon did stir up you know the the Rings and create little patterns in it maybe they would interpret those patterns as different gods though the pattern PS might change too much they might not last long enough for whole religions to come out out of them then again if they did stir up a lot you know people being the pattern Seekers that we are we'd probably look for signs in the Rings you know what we call astrology they might have people whose job it is to to read the signs in the Rings you know psychics and Priests and prognosticators or maybe ancient ringed earthers thought that the Rings were where you know water fell off the edge you know think of how explorers would have felt when they reached the equator and found that the world just kept on going of course the people who lived at the equator would have their own explanations for all that to them the ring might be more of a boundary just dividing the sky into two halves they might be about the twin pantheons maybe male on one side female on the other actually I think a lot of the Ring mythology might be about Pairs and maybe fertility but myth is not the only aspect of culture that would have been affected by the Rings science would have benefited in some ways and hindered in others on the benefit side timekeeping would have been easier the Ring's Shadows would have moved in predictable ways as the Earth revolved around the Sun navigational scientists would have benefited from that like good luck losing your direction on a ringed Earth South would always be ringside and North might be Sky side everywhere in the northern hemisphere vice versa in the southern hemisphere of course astronomy would be both hindered and helped by the rings on one hand obviously it would block large parts of the sky the brightness of the summer months would make astronomical observations really difficult but on the other hand some think that having Rings would have created an earli understanding of the nature of gravity in the solar system maybe even aided with determining the distances to the Stars we might have been a space fairing civilization a thousand years ago or maybe not in fact we might not ever be able to leave a ringed Earth orbiting gets kind of hard when there's you know Rings there now granted most of the satellites that we currently orbit are between 500 and 2,000 km so we could definitely get a lot of payload up there in the area below the Rings geostationary orbit would be like twice as far out as our rings so they'd be safe and there's actually plenty of medium earth orbit or Meo that would EAS easily clear the Rings but getting them out beyond the rings that would be trickier not impossible but trickier I will say this a lot of astronauts talk about how they go up to space because they love space and whatnot but once they get up there they look up and all they see is Blackness and and emptiness and then they find themselves staring down at Earth the whole time kind of the astronauts Paradox if you will that would not be the case if there were rings I imagine the views out into space over those Rings would be spectacular uh especially if you're orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes that means once every 45 minutes you might fly past the Rings it would be hard not to stare as these rings come flying toward you I I just I imagine that would be an amazing site so they think the earth once had Rings it's kind of impossible to know how big they might have been um it might not have been anything at all like what we're talked about here I for one would kind of hope that they were smaller and not quite as big as what I'm just talking about I mean a tiny thin ring would still be cool but it wouldn't have all the temperature and weather effects that those large saturn-like rings would have now before I close this up I feel like I should be super pedantic and point out that you know some might argue that we actually do have rings right now lots of them actually um the Rings being the orbits of those satellites I was just talking about because there are certain orbital corridors that satellites tend to follow especially in geostationary satellites as you can see things get pretty chaotic around low earth orbit but in higher up orbits they tend to form Rings some Go in different directions than the equatorial rings that we imagine but the geostationary orbits I mean if that's not a ring I don't know what it is now obviously some of these rings are things that we don't really want space junk is a problem um most of them are low enough to come down eventually like I said under the you know thousand km level where the atmospheric drag would pull it down uh but it is still a problem I didn't interview on my podcast a while back with mariea ja a space environmentalist about the problem with space junk um I recommend you go listen to that I found it enl lightning okay so I set out to make the most scientifically accurate look at the Earth with rings that is humanly possible and the fact of the matter is when it all comes down to it rings would have a really difficult time around Earth so I mentioned my email exchange earlier with Pierre he's longer ready U he had that concern about what the moon's effect on the Rings would be well there was another effect that could also be a problem the Earth itself because unlike the gas giants that all have these big beautiful Rings the Earth is not perfectly round and the distribution of the mass in the earth isn't perfect either as this gravitational map from NASA's gray satellite shows so it's possible that all these gravitational aberration on Earth Earth might you know stir up the Rings even more than the moon would which again could create spikes and spokes in the Rings at the least and at the most it might destabilize the whole thing entirely so perhaps in the end after all of this the most scientifically accurate view of a ringed Earth is an earth without rings and actually that's okay CU those same Earth conditions that may not be suitable for Rings were the conditions that made life on Earth possible and life's pretty great too so I guess you know for a planet to both have life and Rings that's just you know it's too much of a good thing you know like subscriptions are a good thing you know like having access to a service having food delivered to your door medicine that helps you to live better that's a good thing but if you have too many it it adds up and and that is too much of a good thing like I recently found out that I'm actually paying twice for HBO Max through I I sounded up accidentally through two different services I don't know but I barely watch it and I would not have known that if it wasn't for today's sponsor rocket money this is a service that could rocket your money beyond the Rings metaphorically it's not going to put it in a rocket it's not going to do that rocket money is an all-in-one platform that helps you keep more of your money and it does this a few ways one it keeps track 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and basically just gives you a tool to put all your financial entanglements together so you can make smarter decisions you know a lot of people feel like they're not really good with money but the problem is they're really just they don't have good information you know I mean even the best General's got to know where all his troops are in the battlefield if he wants to win the battle the battle for your wallet over 5 million people are using rocket money to help them spend less and save more and in the spirit of spending less you can get started for free when you go to Rocket money.com Joo Scott it doesn't cost you anything it'll show you what you can save and if you want to open up more premium features there's a premium version too I think you'll find it pays for itself so go give it a try that's rocket money.com Scott links down in the description just give it a click check it out all right big thanks to the answer files on patreon and the channel members who are helping to support this channel uh helping to keep the lights on around here forming an awesome Community a great sounding board for all these ideas I get a lot of my ideas from my patreon members but anyway we got some new people I need to shout out real quick we've got uh da Desai uh Richard gildart Richard Jones Kelly Anne Nancy coell Miller Gary Oliver Matthew Mercer who uh is apparently somebody that my assistant Kimmy is a giant fan of she's a voice actor so she's uh really excited to have you on here cool buddy uh Marco curan Anna pone and Darth heathy thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get early access to videos and hang out with Matthew Mercer apparently uh just go to patreon.com anwers with Joe all right please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here I'll put a video right here you can go check out and if you like that one or any of the others that have my face and the thumb nail and the stuff uh I do invite you to subscribe I come back at videos every Monday all right thanks again for watching you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe avoid those rings and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 559,596

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: DUztyRYQ5iU

Length: 23min 11sec (1391 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023