How can mankind duplicate the rings of Saturn for Earth?
With today's technology could mankind create a system of rings similar to Saturn composed of different masses of water particles and silicate minerals that would freeze? How could mankind accomplish this feat of engineering?
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1 answer
Launching stuff from the planet to orbit is expensive.
And if we want to do some major planet colonizing some day we're going to need to build a lot of ships and that means a lot of launches with a lot of equipment from Earth, unless we start manufacturing in space.
So pull in some raw materials in the form of captured asteroids and comets, and launch a couple small factory robots to start building the big factories.
Some of the existing junk would be pulled in and recycled instead of just letting it burn up.
All this manufacturing would produce dust and ice crystals, and over time these would build up until rings started to form in the orbits of the factories.
With all of the junk confined to these rings, maneuvering around the planet gets a lot easier.
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