How would Earth be different if it had rings? How should those

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>>7812076
You mean instead of a moon? Well, the tides for one.

If the Earth had rings. They'd merge into a moon.

Albeit a smaller moon than the one we have.

I guess they would have advanced our spacefaring capabilities, lots of rocks to investigate/claim.

It would have made any space travel very difficult or incredibly dangerous.

Any orbit's going to have to cross the equator twice, so you either take enough fuel up to put yourself in a high orbit in a single burn, or try ploughing your spacecraft through a sheet of rocks at anywhere between a couple of hundred miles and hour and a dozen kilometres a second.

>>7812428

Asteroid belts being dangerous is a meme. Even with one as dense as OP's pic, they still would have a very low chance of hitting you. The distances between them are in the kilometer range.

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>>7812478

A good rule of thumb for judging how dangerous an asteroid belt or planetary ring is is how clearly you can see through it. Something like the Asteroid belt is relatively harmless as the vast majority of lines passing through it don't interact with anything at all. Something like Saturn's rings on the other hand would be suicide. Something that's opaque to light is going to be basically impossible to navigate without hitting something.

Generally, the less light getting through the ring, the less of your spacecraft will getting through it.

>>7812528

Could they not get around that by orbiting higher or lower than the rings?

>>7812528
If you were in the middle of saturn's rings, you wouldn't be able to see them.

If they were that close, wouldn't we be able to predict with super high accuracy their tracks and find safe orbits?

>>7812631
Are you talking about them blocking out sunlight or something else?

>>7812664
I'm talking about it being so diffuse. Clouds have a higher density than Saturn's rings.

>>7812631
>>7812679

I think you underestimate just how dense the rings are, especially nearer the edges.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/satringfact.html

>>7812355
>>7812367
You need moon(s) to have rings, they hold them in place.

>>7813295
But wouldn´t the gravity of the Moon unstabilize the rings and help throw even more meteorites at the planet´s surface?

Then again, would it be possible at all to have rings that don´t throw meteorites at the planet?