Hey gents, worldbuilding question. Two questions, actually.
A: Planetary rings, ala Saturn, but for a terrestrial planet. Yes or no?
B: If yes, would it be unreasonable to assume that the presence of rings would impact the development of civilizations? Because I feel like the presence of rings would lead to sapient creatures determining things like the planet being round and such much earlier than in real life.
Plus, you know, the rings would be a constant reference for north and south, depending on which hemisphere you're in. They'd likely impact navigation.
There's a terrestrial planet in Rogue One that has rings named Lah'mu, in it they cast a shadow over the planet when they were in the sunlight.
As the sun would cross the sky, the shadow would travel with the rings, and affect plant life, if nothing else.
Adam Gomez
Ye dude.
I could see plenty of myths about it, and I could see the "planet is round and roughly X size" thing being easier for early wise men.
Jacob White
Its generally agreed that planetary rings would drastically speed up the progress of a culture's understanding of the actual nature of the heavens, because using the rings you can make a lot of geometric calculations about the solar system using much more basic math. That said, rings make it much, much harder to start a culture of space travel.
Austin Wood
>That said, rings make it much, much harder to start a culture of space travel.
How so?
Not that it's important to the setting, since it's pretty medieval, but now I'm curious.
William Fisher
I question whether or not a planet with a ring system could even form advanced life to begin with.
Jack Gray
Do you know how hard it is to get something into an orbit without crossing a massive orbital plane like a ring? Its like trying to do the long-jump with a 6ft ceiling. The current accepted line is that it would basically make development of space travel functionally impossible with modern day tech, delaying space exploration and research by at least a century of relative technological development. At the same time, rings would actually allow you to do tricks with measuring the brightness of stars, meaning that even ancient cultures would be able to map the relative distances of every star in the night sky with a proper understanding of the extinction properties of light (which, as I understand it, were we'll developed by the end of the Renaissance). In other words, you'd create a society vividly aware of the makeup and layout of the universe around them, but woefully unable to explore even nearby bodies.
Dylan Ross
Not OP, but why couldnt it? If the rings are stable nothing about them would prevent the possibility of life forming.
Brandon Russell
Because the farther you move away from your planet being Earthlike the farther you move away from the possibility of developing advanced life.
Developing life may not be as hard as we once thought, but developing advanced life is still a really delicate balance.
Hudson Ross
I dont even know how to respond to that hooey. I mean, yeah, earth is pretty good, but without more samples you cant really make a sweeping generalization about earth being the gold standard for the formation of life. Its not like we see an abundance of earthlike planets, only kept from being flush with life by their ring system. Like, I get that its nonstandard, but you seem to be making a weird assumption with the thought that somehow the farther you move away from earth the farther you move away from any possibility of intelligent life.
Murphy's law holds. What can happen, will happen, and at present we have a very poor understanding of where life can happen, for lack of more than one definitive sample.
Christopher Jackson
I'm not talking about developing life, I'm talking about developing intelligent life.
Europa, Venus, Titan, and potentially Mars could all be harboring life and we wouldn't know it, but Earth is still the only known planet with both intelligent life, and the potential for intelligent life.
Landon Jones
Why couldn't they just launch a rocket somewhere other than where the ring is?
Levi Anderson
Whats your point?
Because you dont just launch a rocket out into shit, you launch into an orbit, then slingshot to your destination. Otherwise: see my longjump analogy. Rings extend out a long way, and as the rings have momentum in only one plain, if you were to impact, even on the outside edge, them you would do so at full escape velocity and be shredded instantly. Go watch a Kerbal Space Program video on double-speed if you want a primer in orbital mechanics. The long short of it is that you have to make at least a half orbit before you're in position for a slingshot, that is almost always true.
Ian Stewart
Let me try this using numbers that you may be familiar with.
So, to give yourself the most time, the best you could do is launch from the poles, because you're farthest away from the rings, and you need to orbit the planets center of mass so its not like you can orbit a latitude or something. Alright. So a common low-orbit velocity is once around every 90 minutes, meaning that you get 1/4 of that, because you're going from the pole, and trying not to hit the ring. Great, so you have 23 minutes. The first 5 of that (being charitable) are going to be spent on ascent, and the last 10 you cant really use, because by then it will be too late to avoid the ring system. That leaves you with 8 whole minutes to plan, calculate, check, and perform a roll program and a high-orbit burn, which without bitchin computers would be absurdly difficult.
Your other option would be to make rockets bigger than anything we build today and launch straight for geostationary orbit in a plain offset from the ring system. Viable, but still crazy difficult.
Carter Williams
The Earth is far from the ideal terrestrial planet. Superhabitable planets would be drier and have shallower oceans, for example.
>Superhabitable I'm reminded of a HFY setting that I never read beyond the first installment.
Gabriel Russell
Super-habitability still does not automatically mean intelligent life. From the sheer silence of the cosmos it seems likely there are far more factors necessary for intelligent life than we've thought.
Jeremiah Harris
Either that or everyone is trying to keep as quiet as possible because they know something we don't.
Earth could be the equivalent of that stupid bitch from the 3rd Jurassic Park film shouting Erik down a microphone despite knowing that there are man eating predators on the island.
They all know there is something out there and are keeping quiet. They can hear us shouting Erik down the microphone like the suicidal retards that we are but they can't warn us without drawing attention to themselves.
Caleb Sullivan
Or another possibility is that the sheer number of variables that need to be perfect in order for intelligent life to exist could result in our planet being the only planet with intelligent life in the universe.
Sorry, meant to say that. It's likely there exists other intelligent life, but it's also a possibility we're the only ones that exist in our "neighborhood".
Wyatt Collins
Tbh lad the rings probably wouldn't start in leo and then you have time, the orbital transfers to geo from there wouldn't be all that difficult depending on how far the rings extend. (still difficult though) This could be true where neighborhood means the greatest distance we can travel lacking ftl means. Say by the time we saw a civilization billions of years have already passed and by the time we reach out to them another billion years has. The orbit will always be about the center, so there's no possible orbit where you wouldn't intersect the plane of the rings, that being said, at low orbits it might not matter. Cassini has passed through the gap between Saturn and it's closest ring.
Sebastian Watson
Rings extend FAR dude. Maybe if you had a wimpy ring system in low orbit you could make the transfer to geo, but there would just be so much fucking shit up there. Whatever event caused the rings is bound to throw up a bit of natural Kessler Syndrome bullshit. Hell, any time something makes a pass at the ring you'd be kicking out a ton (literally) of debris!
The idea that we should have detected other alien civilizations by now totally ignores how radio signals work. The concept that they just keep going forever and will be even remotely comprehensible without using a focused system is ludicrous and was posited by somebody who had no idea what they were talking about.
Liam Russell
An extended habitable zone, like what some desert planets would have, also means that intelligent life has billions of years more to evolve than Earthlike planets. Stars get 5-10% brighter every billion years. The last global glaciation happened about 600 million years ago, and in 1 billion years the Sun will be so bright that life on Earth will perish. That leaves a window of roughly 1.5 billion years for multicellular life to flourish, and time seems like one of the most important factors of the evolution of sapient life.
It goes against everything we know about planetary science and astrobiology to say that our planet is 'just right'. Earth has all the basic necessities like liquid water and plate tectonics, and some quite improbable extra goodies like a large satellite, but isn't a perfect planet.
As opposed to I see little reason why planetary rings would hinder in any way the evolution of complex life. It's just chunks of ice that are small enough to burn up in the atmosphere should they fall down. The rings' formation might've been violent, but so was Theia colliding with Earth.
James Moore
Leaving aside the earth-centric dumbass, let's truly discuss how rings might effect the cultures of a world. FYI, rings are caused by the ROCHE LIMIT, which causes objects not held together by mechanisms other than gravity to split apart from tidal stresses (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit). The only known exceptions are saturn's E and Pheobe rings. For an Earth size planet with equal gravity and an equal size moon, the point of destruction for said moon will be between 9.5 and 18.3 million meters. Initial debris spread will "bulge" perpendicular to debris orbit and roche limit when the widest point of the object passes through the point of destruction. Over time, small gravitational attraction, kessler cascades, and deorbiting will bring them into a single plane of orbit. So, if the campaign is early enough past the rings forming, legends of a great apocolypse will abound. Further forward, these fade away, and adaptation brings out the fun stuff. Most cultural effects will be as and said: most of the effect is in astronomy (including the calendar. sidenote: multiple moons makes the development of an accurate calendar easier) and navigation for sciences, religion has a new celestial body to latch onto, and animals also have something to navigate and see by. Due to light reflecting off the rings (much like the moon and its phases), plants evolve to absorb light for longer, leading to more growth from the available energy. Nocturnal hunting is more common, as is spontaneous outbreaks of musical numbers amongst wildlife. Depending on how long the debris (that's all a ring is) has been around, space travel could be severely impacted from a lack of orbital space.
Mason Turner
My "zodiac signs" are based on shapes that people noted in the ring.
Expanding on what this guy was on about, assuming the planet was on a tilted axis, you'd have a ring-winters which would be...neet I guess? Other than that you can come up with whatever myths you want, but in the end its really hard for any civilization which an travel significant distance not to figure out the ring is...well, a ring around a sphere.
Ryan Roberts
>There's a terrestrial planet in Rogue One that has rings named Lah'mu, in it they cast a shadow over the planet when they were in the sunlight. There's a planet in the Rebels cartoon that's the same way.
