High-Level Project Summary
SuperpowEARTH gave us the opportunity to reflect on the problems Earth faces and also what wonders she has. We attributed her with a numerous arsenal of superpowers, but still a global problem constantly threatens her: us. When thinking about an extra power for Mother Earth, the instinctive thought would be to make her endure even more abuse from us. We cannot just say, “Add more trees!” and hope to take even more trees from her. What we have is the power for her to stop us once it reaches her limit. And once we stop, we cannot just let Mother Earth regenerate herself, we have to help heal her. After all, as Star-Lord so eloquently puts it, we are “one of the idiots living in it.”
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
To address the SuperPowEARTH challenge, we collaborated to envision a world, in which Mother Earth, in addition to the many powers she already wields also has one additional superpower, which would result in a more sustainable and healthy world.
In order to do that, we started with the powers that Mother Earth already possesses. We identified the carbon, water, and energy cycles, because of which life has evolved on earth, the gravitational and magnetic fields, which made Earth an inhabitable planet in the first place, the instincts that animals developed while evolving to better cohabit with humans and the role of earth in enabling the process, the naturally existing carbon sinks and the ability to regenerate and rebalance all the life forms and activities on the planet. After much brainstorming, all these abilities culminated into a very instinctive ability of Mother Earth to observe, coordinate and interconnect with every particle and creature, and also to create a seamless flow of life, energy, and processes to make living possible.
We attempted in capturing this idea into a superhero, which is a hand-drawn vision from our team. The rendering has been further developed using Adobe Photoshop. The crown represents the three cycles and the tiger, the Earth’s ability to communicate with wildlife, and the natural environment. She carries in her rear right hand, the symbol for planet earth, and in the rear left hand, one of the terrifying powers of hers- the tornado. One of her hands is rendered lifeless as a symbol of the degrading health of our planet. Once we have realized the immense nature of the abilities that Earth already seems to have, we started to think of reasons for the existing challenges- global warming, food and water shortage, pollution, melting ice caps, and ecosystem destruction. All these challenges are endangering the delicate balance that is essential for the continuance of life.
Our research revealed that it is not overpopulation or a lack of resources, but the improper use of resources that is behind the challenges we are facing today. We do not seem to realize when we have crossed a line or the consequences of our actions without the benefit of retrospection. And by the time we realize the consequences of our actions, it might be too late for Earth to rebalance this time.
Therefore, we would like the Earth to have a new Super Power, the ability to raise our inbuilt alarm system, which lets us know intuitively, that we should stop, take a step back and ponder the consequences of our actions. While Earth seems to have a signal system now (global warming), the superpower would be a real-time control system! We believe what we need right now is not another ability for Earth to accommodate us by providing more resources but to keep us in check.
We have incorporated this new superpower of Earth into our sketch as a force field around her, with which she will be able to maintain the balance of the earth, this time with humans rather than in spite of them.
Space Agency Data
We have used the NASA resources provided for the SuperPowEARTH challenge to understand the importance of Carbon, Water and Energy Cycles of Earth.
We found the required resources under the link: https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/mirador-guide?tree=scienceArea&scienceArea=Water%20and%20Energy%20Cycles
The explanation we found here helped us understand how the earth balances various essential life processes that are the building blocks of life. This realization led us to visualize our SuperHero with her existing powers.
We used an article called" What Might Have Been" by the NASA earth observatory to determine the change in ozone layer thickness from past years https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/WorldWithoutOzone/page2.php
One of the most important protection layers on earth is the ozone layer found in the stratosphere which is depleting at a very fast rate, and we found the inspiration to add the depleting life from Earth from this article and our vision for the future as well
Hackathon Journey
We only knew about this Hackathon a week before it started. At first, we were doubting whether we would want to join or not, but eventually, everyone had time and so we registered for the Hackathon. The experience is really unique because it is just a 2 day event. It is really quick so everyone had to contribute and maximise the time to finish the challenge.
Navigating through the website is really clear and we could easily register and find a topic that we would like to do. We learned a lot regarding the challenge that we are doing, SuperpowEARTH. We learned about the different environmental disasters that happen on earth everyday and how some people do not even care about them. Earth would eventually be polluted if it is not taken care of and us humans would struggle if the earth is polluted and dirty.
What inspired us as a group to choose this challenge because it is a real life situation currently and everyone voted and agreed that this is a challenge that we all would be interested in tackling because of the uniqueness of the challenge. How we approach the challenge is by first researching all the necessary information regarding the challenge. We also participated in the zoom meeting with mentors that gave us a better understanding on how we should tackle the challenge and how we should submit our final presentation.
One of the challenges that we face is time management. Since it is in the weekends, some of us are busy juggling homework, family, and getting a time to get together and discuss. It was definitely not easy but we eventually found a time that we could do and finish the project during that call. We definitely would like to thank everyone mentors and the facilitators because they helped us a lot with showing us how we should approach the project and giving us pointer to finish our final presentation.
References
- NOAA's 2020 Annual Climate Report
- "What Might Have Been" from NASA earth observatory
- "Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017" Nature.ll
- "A Survey of Environmental Awareness, Attitude, and Participation amongst University Students: A Case Study" Mohammed Yahaya Abbas1 , Ripudaman Singh2
- The U.S. Geological Survey
- "Water and Energy Cycle" from NASA GES DISC
Tags
#environment, #earth, #art
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.