most of our Satelittles orbit around the equator, the ring could interfere with the communications or even worse fully destroy the satellites by bombarding it. Once these are established they might be very hard to get rid of, Very Hard!

they would also affect the earths magnetic feild, water would seem to behave differently, we might start to expereince high tides with those rings?

i know i sound crazy, but suppose those tiny rocks clump together to form a bigger one, we might get into trouble, the gravitational feilf caused by it might also push the earth out of its natural orbit, which is very bad… too close the sun, we burn! Too far away, We freeze.

in a navigation point of view, this could be used to find out the latitude of the ships current position, which would be really great because , OBVIOUSLY WE DONT HAVE GPS, SO WE ARE GOING TO USE THE OLD FASHIONED TRIGONOMETRY.

i find this idea useless, unless we could build a ring..which could be something like in the sci-fi game (HALO)… that could be good in one sense (Planetery Defense?)

The humans, inreasingly frustrated with the alien’s unwillingness to communicate and their inability to even understand what is going on in that solar system, eventually destroy the ring with a sun-powered laser, which is enough of a threat for the aliens to finally allow one of the crew to land. He discovers the true nature of the planet’s inhabitants, but dies before he can share it when the laser is turned on the planet because he misses his scheduled radio contact with the ship.

So yeah, there’s another way to create rings around earth: Eject material from the surface into orbit.

In fact, we are sort of creating a ring system right now, made up of space junk!
We’d have to keep doing that for centuries though before it becomes visible to the naked eye of course, and it’s not actually a desirable thing to do.

If you blew up the moon, it would either
a) send a billion pieces of rock into space
or
b)cause tons of rock into earth ending all life.

If you are going to blow up the moon do 12/21/2012
that way if it b) it will already be doomsday.

P.S. b) is more likely.

Hahaha! Albedo for the win!

Travis might be interested in the article:,Cost of non-metrication in the USA, that you can find at http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CostOfNonMetrication.pdf

Cheers,

Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia

“The organization estimates there are also millions of much smaller objects floating around, and all of it combined weighs about 5,500 tons.” Thats less than two loaded jumbo jets.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Kilometer

And seriously? A Cost/Benefit analysis for metric conversion in the US? Was one done for that incredibly stupid Daylight Savings Time Change … change? Just the man-hours (in metric hours?) for changing all the computer rules for that must have cost billions (of metric dollars).

Seriously though…

I have been wondering about the ring system being equatorial. Is there any actual reason for that? Some above have called for the destruction of the moon to create such a ring – would that particular ring definitely NOT be equatorial?

I don’t see any physical reason for an equatorial ring system for the Earth – and of course, the existing moon would affect such a ring to the point of disturbing it well away from an equatorial system. To be geo-stationary, of course it would have to be equatorial, but all other orbits (yes, even geo-synchronous orbits) do not have to be equatorial.

JC