Hannah Shehryar
Grade: 7
Teacher: Ms. P. Chong
School: Cosburn Middle School
City: Toronto, Ontario
Topic: Ariel
Imagine you’re dying from a disease and the antidote is right within your reach. Your first instinct would be to grab it before you die. Just like that, our earth is the one that's dying and the antidote is only a decade away. Ariel, a moon of Uranus.
Our planet is perishing because we’re overusing and slowly running out of fossil fuels. If we ever come to a time where there's nothing we can do about saving our earth, wouldn’t it be nice knowing that there is a possibly habitable world out there? But if we do manage to create enough spacesuits and we make it on to Ariel, it would be helpful knowing what to expect there.
We already know many facts about Ariel but it would be great if we could know more.
Carbon dioxide has been detected on Ariel. It has also been confirmed that Ariel’s surface has been darkened by carbonaceous material, and the planet is also full of silicate rock. These are all resources that we really need and instead of turning the earth upside down looking for more, we can just fly out to Ariel and use some materials from that world to save our own. Like I said before, we’re overusing fossil fuels and burning all of them is warming up and destroying our planet so if we stop that and use carbonaceous material from Ariel instead, it would affect our planet gravely and with a positive impact. If our world ever gets to the point where we can’t save it and our chance of survival is low, we will have to evacuate. The moon has some similarities to earth and I think that if we explore Ariel some more, it’s possible we might find refuge there as well.
Traces of methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, transactions of garbels, ice and water. These are all signs that there might be or might have been life on Ariel. There is no way of knowing whether there is life there or not unless NASA sends a spaceship to go investigate. Despite the fact that we can’t tell if there is life in the present, we can still make an educated guess that there was life there in the past. There are many factors that feed into this theory. The first one is that the planet didn’t always use to be this cold, it was actually much warmer. Scientists have guaranteed that in an earlier time, Ariel appeared to have undergone heating to allow differentiation. That leaves a possibility that there could have been life on Ariel before it froze! Not to mention that out of all the moons of Uranus, Ariel has the least amount of craters that hit it and the few that did hit were fairly small. I think this is a theory that can be very real however, we can never be sure unless NASA can confirm or deny the facts by going to Ariel.
Ariel can be useful to us in more ways than one. It can provide us resources, refuge, and knowledge. If we don’t explore this moon further, it can affect us gravely in the future and even if the earth never comes to the point of dying, if we come to learn that extraterrestrial life exists, that knowledge will help us improve science. We shouldn’t be silly enough to ignore this opportunity to find what we need before we run out of time.
