Earth may have its own rings like Saturn.

www.livescience.com...

A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.

There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.

And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops.


can yall guys imagine making Earth having rings? at least its something we can see with our telescopes besides looking at the moon which tends to get boring.

That is interesting, though with the night sky being lit up, you probably wouldn't see much else through a telescope. But if it means regulating the Earth's temperature to keep from becoming inhabitable, it would be well worth the price.

It sounds similar to Arthur C. Clark's ring from his book 3001, which was a sequel to 2001, 2010, and 2030. He envisioned a geo-synchronous ring with elevators that anyone can travel through.

Nice website, BTW the pictures of Earth from above are cool.

The Weekly World News ran an article about the earth gaining rings, probably a few years ago at this point.

They were saying that the rings would accumulate naturally, and would be composed of space junk, and small debris/dust.

I think conceptually it's possible, though I've seen no evidence.

Point is, we may not have to go to all the trouble of making rings.

There are already over 10,000 tracked objects of man made debris orbiting earth.
We could make the ring real fast, by blasting all our used diapers into space...eew.

If we want to prevent global warming all we need to do is have all our robots gather on an isolated Island, point thier exauhst nozles upwards and propel the earth into a wider orbit.

Okay... seriously

I think a better solution is to have a ring of one sided mylar ballons "disks" in orbit around the earth to reflect some of the Suns energy away. that way they wouldn't prevent any astronomic observations via glare

Or you could even use a ring of parabolic mirrors that reflect to a solar array at the earths first Lagrange point to "store energy" to power orbiting craft. while at the same time reflecting the suns energy away from the earth

What happens when global warming stops and we're left with a ring of little mirrors cooling us off even more? We go up and sweep it all away?
We cannot continue to assume success by simply treating the symptoms of our planet's sickness... us. WE are the ones who must change, and we are, slowly.
If someone has cancer, do you treat the vomiting or eradicate the tumor? Our little ball of rock is VERY resiliant.. it has survived catastrophies far worse than the evolution of mankind, and it will survive them again. All we must do is balance ourselves in this natural order.. it is either this or extinction. Unfortunately I see few paths around the latter.

Population control, limited fossil fuel usage, intelligent resource management. So close, yet so far away.

Originally posted by apc
Population control, limited fossil fuel usage, intelligent resource management. So close, yet so far away.

Indeed, we have the resources and the technology to embrace a more harmonious lifestyle but the powers in charge who "know whats best for the consumers" have to do things thier crooked ways.

Or we could just not destroy the earth anymore and build no rings.

but thats not gonna happen....

Originally posted by Linux
... but the powers in charge who "know whats best for the consumers" have to do things thier crooked ways.

If only it were that simple. Our modern technological-industrial way of life is dependant on fossil fuels. Without them, everything we know implodes. When there were barely a billion people grazing the Earth, we were fine. We were stable. We had no worries chopping down a few trees to build our cabins or digging some coal out of the ground. Now we're over 6 billion. We will double that before we get halfway through this century. In short, we're totally screwed, unless we do something about it, now.

Here's an example of the problem: my sister. Last November she blessed me with a second beautiful baby niece. She is thinking about having a THIRD. It was all I could do to not lecture her on this being precisely the problem. Noone seems to realize the impact they themselves are having on the rest of our species simply through excessive multiplication. This must stop, or we all die.

One of the terraforming concepts for Mars includes placing mirrors in orbit to reflect more sun radiation onto the planet and cause heating. It seems logical that if mirrors could be used in this manner, they could be used to deflect some measure of sunlight as well.

they did that in futurerama, and a pebble hit the mirror flipped it onto its oposing direction and then they got burned like a magnfying glass it was distarious!!! yet there are some seemingly comprehensible methods to how the particle ring may ascertain a like fluid of more dense molecules to set aside a lot of radiation. like a jet stream of water that falls onto itself as it travels across the water, a dense compoud might obscure the particle set to collapdse onto itself, with the help of some jet propulsiuoin of course.
also with more advancements in hyrdogens fuels, and containment industrial expulsion gas output will be hindered to a mere 10% what it is today by 2030.

Originally posted by Valhall
One of the terraforming concepts for Mars includes placing mirrors in orbit to reflect more sun radiation onto the planet and cause heating. It seems logical that if mirrors could be used in this manner, they could be used to deflect some measure of sunlight as well.

Yes, and no.

The mirrors for mars would direct little light, and have a very small effect on the actual heating of the planet directly. What they could do is focus an intense beam on the polar ice caps, and release all the greenhouse gases to, in essence, create global warming. They can also help add to the temperature, but iirc the numbers were pretty low from direct. The problem with mirrors for Earth is that it's harder to position them so you dont have a giant shadow hanging over everyone and yet have an effect.

As for the ring, it's an eventual step, but won't start happening until numerous space elevators are built and connected. It's also how one would create a lunar elevator. (attach to a ring) Plus, cheap living!