Could humans ever permanently disrupt Saturn's rings?

[PTNLemay]

A while back I was reading Atomic Rockets and he brings up a really interesting notion on one of his pages. (Paraphrasing a bit)

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/appringraiders.php

Would combat in the asteroid belt would look like Han Solo and the TIE fighters from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. No, since the average separation between asteroids is approximately 16 times the distance between the Terra and Luna, ships in the asteroid belt might never even see an asteroid. The only place you'll find asteroids that densely spaced is in the rings of Saturn.

...

The real reason to use Saturn as the background for a game or novel is because combat in a dense asteroid field is really cool. But we can make additional justifications.

He then goes on to elaborate lots of neat ideas on what could be mined (stuff like Helium3 or ice for terraforming Mars). But those are all good ideas for why humans would travel there, not why they would be fighting among the rings. So I was wondering... what if humans mining the rings for the ice there might cause the rings to deform, spread out, or even be permanently destroyed. I'm guessing some mining techniques would be wasteful and spread some sort of dust and debris pollution all over the Saturnian system. If this was really possible it would be a valid concern to the local colonists, I can totally imagine the first-generation colonials crying out as the mega-corporations started setting up excessive sweep mining, ripping up large portions of the rings. It might bother them enough that rebellions and civil wars would spark between space stations.

But... could we ever actually disrupt the rings like that, even with advanced future tech? Just how much ice and rocks are in the rings? How long have the rings existed anyway? If it's more than a billion years or so they must be inherently very very stable, despite the gravitational perturbations and impacts with stray asteroids they must regularly experience. I've googled this and I can't find much clear info.

[Red Iron Crown]

The Wiki article has some good information:

Aggregate mass of rings: 3 x 10^19 kg or 3 billion billion metric tons

Age: Possibly as little as 100,000,000 years or as much as 4,000,000,000 years

The only way I can think of to significantly disrupt the rings is to introduce some massive body, maybe one of Saturn's larger moons, into an elliptical orbit that intersectsthe rings. That would be enough to absorb much of the mass of the rings while perturbing the orbits of the rest.

How to get such a body into such an orbit is left as an exercise for the reader.

[MBobrik]

why should someone do something like that ?

[SFJackBauer]

why should someone do something like that ?

Uhhh... what is the "something like that" in your question?

- Disrupt permanently the rings?

- Disrupt permanently the rings by mining? (which is the OP question)

- Mine the rings?

- Read Project RHO sci-fi pieces?

- Disrupt permanently the rings by moving a Saturn moon closer to it? (which is Red Iron Crown proposed exercise)

[jwenting]

sure we could. Just start mining the place.

Of course the disruption would be imperceptibly small, but it would be there.

[nhnifong]

The Wiki article has some good information:

Aggregate mass of rings: 3 x 10^19 kg or 3 billion billion metric tons

Age: Possibly as little as 100,000,000 years or as much as 4,000,000,000 years

The only way I can think of to significantly disrupt the rings is to introduce some massive body, maybe one of Saturn's larger moons, into an elliptical orbit that intersectsthe rings. That would be enough to absorb much of the mass of the rings while perturbing the orbits of the rest.

How to get such a body into such an orbit is left as an exercise for the reader.

Clearly this one has played Universe Sandbox

[PTNLemay]

why should someone do something like that ?

Obviously the disruption itself wouldn't be the intent, just a realistic consequence that drives the story. Water from the Ring's ice could have hundreds of potential uses for future colonies, either for life support, fuel, or (like Atomic Rockets says) for wide-scale terraforming. I just wanted some sort of conflict that could plausibly arise at Saturn that would pit two groups against one another strongly enough that they would engage in epic asteroid-field combat. With local Saturn "Preservers" fighting the oppressive Miners Guilds, or something like that.

Edited February 23, 2014 by PTNLemay

[Streetwind]

The notion of "permanently" disrupting the ring system is a bit odd, since the ring system isn't permanent in the first place. It's not ultimately stable and, given enough time, will disperse on its own.

I suppose your question would be better worded as "would humans be able to significantly damage the ring system to the point where they stop being rings". And my answer to that is: I highly doubt it. Maybe with a concerted effort to do so, in a far future; but why would anyone make a concerted effort to do so?

[Motokid600]

We could pollute the hell out of the rings, but not destroy them.

[KvickFlygarn87]

We could pollute the hell out of the rings, but not destroy them.

Well, we could move one of Saturn's moons to orbit with a periapsis at or below the rings and that way send the asteroids out of Jupiters gravity well or into Jupiter.

[jwenting]

Well, we could move one of Saturn's moons to orbit with a periapsis at or below the rings and that way send the asteroids out of Jupiters gravity well or into Jupiter.

no, we could not. Those things are a tad too massive to move around.

[MrZayas1]

Well let me tell you something, instead of completely destroying saturn's rings, I would definitely try to probably mine all the asteroids on it, even if the amount of minerals isn't much (which it is) I could still send the millions of metric tons of rock to building companies, or other for a nice profit! So honestly I think the only time we would ever destroy asteroid belts is if we had inter-planetary war and we ended up destroying them in the process!

[PTNLemay]

@ Mr Zayas

Well... yes, that's what I was asking. I wasn't saying how realistic it would be to have a bunch of arch-villains sitting around a table going "Now how will we destroy Saturn's rings just to mess with those dirty colonists?" I was wondering how realistic it would be to have a bunch of mega-corporation CEOs asking "How much profit can we gain by strip-mining 30% of the ring's total mass? If we can make enough money we can just ignore all of the colonists's complaints."

We could pollute the hell out of the rings, but not destroy them.

This does bring up an interesting point, maybe they wouldn't actually need to permanently distort the rings, just spread industrial levels of residue and dust on a planetary scale. At first it would just be an esthetic thing (which the colonials would surely hate), but eventually the dust and debris getting flung into wild random orbits could actually result in navigational (astrogational?) hazards, which would really light a fire under the colonial's collective asses.