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Ringed Earth


Ringed Earth was intended to be a story based on an idea I had.

Yes I do have ideas all on my own.

But it was an idea based on what we already know, or at least assume, of basic physics. Something as simple as the path of least resistance.

But most humans only apply that to liquids. Possibly to car crashes. Using it practically while they play pool. Yet never giving it the deeper thought that is needed to realize the larger pictures.

Unless they perhaps are a geologist interested in plate tectonics.

Because even things as solid as rock follow basic rules. Maybe at a much slower rate but still they follow the rules.

Don't they?

And that got me to thinking.

Yes dammit I do to think!

Well anmyways I came up with this idea. And not another word out of you. But this idea was a simple time experiment I went over in my head as to the relevancy of the paths of least resistance and continental drift. Wondering if over time the Earth would become encircled by land around it's equater. If possibly Saturn with it's rings displays what could or would happen should the mountains being shoved up from below reached too high into the heavens.

And the story would revolve around someone either accidentally there from our time, or someone living there needing to get back home. Both scenarios would involve a person searching new lands trying to get home. Because after all if they were already home and comfortable they wouldn't be doing many interesting things to write about now would they.

The mind can go over whether or not civilization would still exist as we know it. Either more adnvanced or thrown back into the stone age. The one path leading to a cataclysmic change in the Earth. The other to changes in humanity and culture. Technology, and society. But both ideas would center around the idea that continental drift caused the planet to become ringed by land. Mountains thrusting up into the sky dividing the Earth into two hemispheres. Northern and Southern.

What better place to bring in the floating city ideas. What better land to house those living in glass houses beneath the waves. And like any other thing it would take time to become what it is. Even in the writing. How could I outline a world divided or joined by shifting plates beneath the waves? Wouldn't it suggest earthquakes and cataclysm as the power behind the changes? So then how or whether to mention those years in between as our world is changed in millinia into something new.

Would the animals as we know it still be the same? Could dogs not talk? Cats rule the world? Could Planet of the Apes fashion we train apes to serve us and our needs? Or will we have learned to engineer animals as we see fit? Making new species. And there is the other path where new species would have arose unaided by human hands due to the time each cataclysmic event allowed animals. The safety it allowed them away from humans.

How to give you the story without going into all the he said she said sequences? I mean I guess I could outline it in short form and hope you get part of the picture. And by not filling in all the blanks allow you to construct visions I myself have not seen. Perhaps for a moment I can get you thinking of sails in the wind on another planet that is the same we live on. A new place with much potential for all instead of daily grinds making money to buy things we really don't need. Perhaps for these moments we can both forget our real lives and instead live the lives we know we've always wanted to.

But what frontiers do we simple humans have left? And I tell you we have the seas. Under the waves a great home to be harvested and tamed. A place we understand less than the stars above our head. A new frontier awaiting those who would or could conquer it. And it's because of these simple science fiction dreams that people imagine what may be in a future day. Long before there were planes men thought of flying things. Long before there were trains and cars men envisioned such things. Not to leave the women out but I'm sure they in there way have helped bring comfort to us all. Often pushing men to think up something needed and when all else fails showing them how to do the damn things.

But that is what many of us fight against. We run from comfort to "rough it". We go camping and return to nature so we may be bit by insects and subjected to using the bathroom in the woods. We exhert our muscles canoeing so we can feel like pioneers. So we can return to nature. Because many of us have a longing desire to return to nature.

And in my sci fi brain a voice bubbles forward to remind me a nuke or a hundred could change the landscape of the world and we might get back to nature alot quicker than anyone might think. But there are those already living daily in fallout shelters so it's not like we've thought of anything new. Nothing under the sun. But a ringed Earth is a possibility. Much as the football shaped universe. But I won't go into that here because it's a whole nother spectrum of reality that would explain universal laws and actions depending upon the shape of the universe.

But would you get any of the story after listening to the psycho babble I mutter when my mind goes off on new tracks while still explaing the first? Probably not, but the mountains would look beautiful from the water wouldn't they?

Earth may once have been surrounded by temporary rings of debris, much like Saturn, according to a new computer model that finds the rings might have cast parts of the planet into a twilight glow all day long.

The idea is not new, but the fresh modeling adds weight to the plausibility of an asteroid impact kicking up a sea of orbiting debris, and it considers how the rings would have cooled Earth's climate.

The new model, based on Saturns B-ring scaled down to Earth-size, was produced by Peter Fawcett of the University of New Mexico and Mark Boslough of the U.S. Department of Energys Sandia National Laboratories. It is based on climate models that had already been developed.

The scientists said a ring might form with a glancing blow, in which a space rock and the debris it carves from the planet ricochet into the atmosphere.

An expanding vapor cloud causes some of the debris to go into orbit. Over time, it collapses into a plane that matches Earth's equator. The ring then lasts from about 100,000 years to perhaps 1 million years at most.

Fawcett told SPACE.com the debris ring would have cooled the planet by blocking or reducing the amount of sunlight received in the tropics and subtropics. The rest of the planet would cool, too, because less heat would be transported from tropical regions to higher latitudes. That would mean fewer storms farther north.

The work is speculative, the researchers say, but there is some evidence they might be on the right track.

Geologic records reveal a layer of melted meteorite material thought to be associated with an asteroid impact 35.5 million years ago. Some 100,000 years of cooler global temperatures followed.

"This cooling is longer than one would expect from a large impact alone, so we hypothesized that a temporary ring might have formed," Fawcett said. "The jury is still out on this though."

Had there been any humans on the planet to survive the impact and witness the rings, it's hard to say exactly what they would have seen. But Boslough has some ideas, based on an assumption that the rings would have been semi-transparent, like Saturn's.

"For a person in the shadow of a reasonably opaque ring, it would be dark like twilight or a heavy overcast," he said. "The ring would be scattering light in addition to blocking it. I think the most spectacular view would be after sunset or before sunrise, when the sky is dark but parts of the sunlit ring would be brightly visible in the sky."

selden wrote:Rings would cause a dramatic cooling if they're mostly opaque like Saturn's. They'd tend to reflect sunlight away from the Earth, not focus it. The Earth's axis is tipped enough that most of each of the hemispheres would be in shadow for most of its winter. (You could show the shadowing in Celestia.)

The Moon's gravity causes the orbits of bodies closer to the Earth to be unstable, so rings inside the Moon's orbit would be dispersed rather quickly on astronomical time scales.

You could use Celestia to show how the rings would look from the ground.

PlutonianEmpire wrote:Are those saturn's rings, or did you draw them by yourself?

PlutonianEmpire wrote:@selden
so, if my rings were there in real life, they'd be dispersed by the moon in just a few centuries or something?

Cham wrote:One day, earth will have a thick ring system visible around it (donught shaped), made of all the dead satellites and debris that we are placing in space.

TERRIER wrote:Just as a matter of interest, how many satellites would we be talking about to form a visible ring ?

maxim wrote:

TERRIER wrote:Just as a matter of interest, how many satellites would we be talking about to form a visible ring ?

Saturn rings would about fill a sphere of 100 km in diameter as a solid body. Assuming water as main component this would be a mass of 5235 billion tons. Further assuming that one satellite weights about 1 ton, we would need roughly 5000 billion satellites to form a saturnlike ring.

maxim