Junior cycle winning essay

  • New and old buildings together, litup for night

    Jayne's photograph "Old Energy V New" also took first prize in the Junior Cycle
    category of the Science Week Science Snaps competition

    By Jayne Groarke (13), Scoil Mhuire, Wellington Road, Cork

    Junior cycle winner, Science Week 2008 schools essay competition on "Science – Shaping Our World"

    Hello. My name is Zwinky. I come from Zeck, a country in the planet Squashque. I have been looking down from my spaceship and observing the differences between Squashque and Earth. Squashque is a little bigger than Earth, but Zeck is almost the same size as Ireland.

    From space, Earth is a beautiful blue planet, but it is not so beautiful when you look closer. Filthy black and white smoke gushes from chimneys around the planet. The rivers and lakes are filled with domestic and industrial waste. The beautiful green forests are being cut down to make way for further infrastructure.

    Plants and animals are losing their habitats and some may even become extinct. The clean white polar icecaps are melting away because of global warming. The blue planet is choking itself.

    It is not enough that the cities and roads on Earth spew out black smoke, carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Earthlings have turned to their skies with aeroplanes to inject deadly pollutants into their upper atmosphere.

    Now nearly every cloud in the sky has a deadly silver lining. The atmosphere is heating up and Ireland's climate is changing to hotter summers, and wet and windy winters, which will lead to shortages of water in summertime, with lots of storms and flooding in winter.

    On Squashque, we don't have pollution from transport powered by petrol, diesel or even rapeseed. We use anti-gravity power in our spaceships to get around our planet and the universe. We learned how to conquer gravity by accident, when experimenting with particles, like humans are starting to do at the CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) particle accelerator on the French/Swiss border.

    We have also learned how to transport matter from one place to another, so we don't have large trucks, aeroplanes or ships flying around our planet. We use teleporting machines to transport objects. But we haven't been brave enough to try the teleporters on ourselves yet.

    We don't live in houses. We live in caves that are carved into the ground. They are cool in summer and warm in winter. We also generate electricity, but all our energy comes from renewable resources and not fossil fuels.

    We love Squashque and we do not want to harm her, so we don't use fuels that will pollute our atmosphere. We don't use biofuels or biomass, because while they are renewable energy sources they give off pollutants when burned.

    Instead we use clean renewable energy sources such as solar (energy from our sun), geothermal (energy from the magma core in our planet), hydroelectricity (energy from our rivers), tidal (energy from the tides in our oceans), wave (energy from the waves in our seas) and wind power.

    Most of our energy is geothermal, because it is always available, and unlike wind and wave power it is not dependent on weather conditions. We have a special metal called Robeniu that humans don't have. Robeniu doesn't melt at high temperature. We drill deep down to the magma of our planet and build large water tanks using Robeniu.

    When these tanks are heated by the magma the water is boiled and the steam is used to produce electricity. The hot water from these tanks also heats our caves and provides us with hot water.

    From space, Squashque looks blue and green. Blue from the oceans and green from the many forests that cover our planet. We only cut down trees to make furniture for our homes. We rarely clear forest to make way for construction. All agricultural waste runs through drains to special waste treatment plants where all pollutants are removed. Most of the waste is turned into fertilizers to be used on our fields again.

    Waste water from homes and businesses are also specially treated before being discharged into a river or stream. The water in our rivers and lakes is clean and crystal clear and you can safely swim in all of them. The same can't be said for the murky waters of Ireland's River Liffey or River Lee. The only pollutants in our rivers and lakes are from our wild animals.

    The more I look at Earth I feel saddened and sick, but I see some changes. More and more Earthlings are using science to shape their world into a cleaner and better planet to live in. Forests of windmills are rising over Ireland's hills.

    Roofs are wearing sparkling solar panels. Houses are now becoming better insulated so that less heat is lost through the walls and roofs.

    People are turning off lights and electrical appliances when not in use. Some houses have switched to geothermal power to heat their homes. There is a huge increase in experiments on tidal and wave energy.

    Cars and trucks are burning less fuel to do the same journey and they are emitting fewer pollutants. More and more biofuels and biomass are being produced for vehicle use. Many vehicles from Cork City Council, Dublin Bus and many other companies are now running on biofuels.

    It will take time to reverse global warming and replace the huge smoking chimneys of fossil-fuelled power stations with cleaner forms of power, but the Earth's governments are working together to tackle greenhouse gases, climate change and pollution. I hope that Earthlings can learn to shape their world into a cleaner, better place to live in just like Squashque.