Yeah, that seems like a pretty wide swath.
Thanks for doing the math on this.
Well, no, not necessarily. For one thing, you’d only be in darkness for a portion of the day, I think. And it’d only be for part of a season, so the half that’s in summer could heat the half that’s not (I think). The springs and summers would have a negligible effect on us.
Secondly, the ring is very, very thin. On saturn, it’s only 10 meters thick! So on Earth, it’d be roughly a meter wide. Perhaps that’s not thick enough to block much light anyway.
And when the tip of the shadow comes near you, you’d get a massive rainbow effect. The ‘shadow’ would really be the sun disappearing behind the very tip of the rings. This might not cause darkness, but instead a brilliant color display as the sun moves across different ice chunks. Imagine a giant disco ball in the sky!
Yes, his name was Seeker and he became Teela’s new love interest. But in the next volume, Teela tells how they found the Control Center and tree-of-life, which killed Seeker as he was too old to become a protector; which explains whywe never see him again.
The animation shows a pretty dark shadow cast on the Earth, much in the same way we see shadows on Saturn. But maybe you’re right, it might not block any more sunlight than cloud cover, which certainly doesn’t throw us into a deep freeze.
But with cloud cover, the sunlight is still reaching the atmosphere.
How 'bout a ringed Earth with dinosaurs?
ringed Earth with dinosaurs topped with chocolate sprinkles!