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The rings of Saturn are a majestic jewel for our eyes, but they and other planetary rings

around distant worlds and stars may be critical to colonizing the galaxy

with life, and indeed, maybe where some life originated.

So some years back, when we began our Outward Bound series, we did our first three episodes

on Mars, Venus, and Titan respectively, and I always regretted that by doing

Saturn's Moon Titan, rather than Saturn as a whole, that we skipped a lot of cool

discussion around colonizing Saturn's rings themselves, or even extreme options like

crafting a shellboard around Saturn to make a giant Earth-like planet.

As I got to thinking about it, it occurred to me that planetary

rings are fascinating from quite a few angles, both Saturn's and those around other worlds

in our solar system, and those around distant exoplanets around alien stars. Indeed, they

represent one of the more plausible places alien life could conceivably emerge from besides our typical Earth-like planet.

Furthermore, we can't have rings around not just gas giants, but also around rocky

worlds like Earth, and the composition of those can vary too.

We believe Saturn's ring is composed mostly of ice, water ice, but also things like frozen ammonia

...