If Earth had rings like Saturn or Uranus, what might that be like? In this brilliant fusion of fantasy, art and science, artist Roy Prol asks this question in this video
If Earth had rings like Saturn or Uranus, what might that be like? How might that have influenced human science, culture, navigation, mythology and religion throughout the ages? Since the rings would be so bright, we might not have seen (m)any stars and planets, so how might this have affected astronomy? Would we even have a Copernicus, Galileo, or Kepler? Would Brahe have seen 'his' famous supernova?
In this brilliant fusion of fantasy, art and science, artist Roy Prol proposes what an Earthly ring system might look like in this lovely video. He starts by showing the orientation of the rings, then moves on to imagine what the rings might look like when viewed from the ground in various cities around the world, day and night:
Interestingly, a ring system around Earth isn't as fantastical as one might initially suppose. In a paper published by Nature in 1980, John O'Keefe of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center speculated that Earth may have had a ring system similar to Saturn's for a brief time period (DOI: 10.1038/285309a0 [sadly, the PDF is not freely available]).
In that paper, O'Keefe discusses climatic data from 34 million years ago indicating that winters became extremely cold at the end of the Eocene. At approximately the same time, Earth was bombarded by showers of tektites -- glassy rocks of mysterious origin. O'Keefe hypothesises that tektites and microtektites that missed Earth were captured by the Earth's gravitational field and became organized into a ring system like that of Saturn. This ring system may have persisted for millions of years, casting a winter shadow across Earth's surface that led to exceptionally cold winter temperatures and contributed to a late Eocene die-off of many marine organisms, such as plankton and mollusks.
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