mine routine
Their days quickly turned into a routine. Every “morning,” they crawled out of their sleeping bags when Alex’s alarm clock went off at midnight. Alex and Doug lived medieval monastery hours; they got up in the middle of the night and called it morning. Monastery hours began when Doug saw their stove exhaust forming towering white plumes outside in the cold daylight air. The plumes could be seen from miles away. Staying hidden remained a top priority, so they shifted their hours to run “hot” (even though it never got hot) at night. During daylight hours, they tamped down the stoves to avoid plumes.
After squirming out of their bags, they flipped on camping lanterns and quickly changed their base layer underwear. Alex and Doug constantly rotated through sets of base-layer underwear. Wearing, changing, and drying them over clotheslines rigged above the stoves. After hanging yesterday’s underwear above the stove, they plugged the small air vent on the wall above the tent with thick insulation. Air trapped in the box was limited; they worried about suffocating when sleeping. Next, Alex studied his daily task list for the umpteenth time. His list had many things to do. He couldn’t depend on remembering everything without constant review.
“How many times are you going to read that old man? You’d think you’d know it by now.”
“It’s what you think you know that gets you in trouble.”
Alex’s first task, as always, was starting a daily log notebook entry and noting the powerpack charge levels and the box’s interior temperature and humidity. It was warm this morning, about two degrees Celsius. Alex tracked their wake-up temperature with a spreadsheet. He estimated they could tolerate outdoor temperatures of minus 200 degrees Celsius. Below -200C, even the inner box would become too cold. One of his spreadsheet trend lines estimated when they’d hit -200C. He looked at it frequently but didn’t discuss their doom date with Doug.
Next, Alex turned on his laptop and checked the exterior webcam views. The night vision view on the north-facing webcam showed snow had drifted over the mine entrance again. They’d have to dig out again. The thermometer on the north antenna pole always read -60 Fahrenheit. It was too cold for the thermometer. Using copper spool resistance, he estimated an outside temperature of -78 Celsius. Cold even for the middle of old Antarctica. He didn’t see anything on the south-facing webcam. It was probably overcast. Satisfied with the webcam views, Alex shut down his laptop.
While Alex checked the webcams, Doug listened to the radio. For the last month, he had dutifully compared radio-reported temperatures to their copper spool resistance estimates. They corresponded until about a week before Earth crossed Mar’s orbit. From then, the radio temperatures were significantly warmer than their estimates.
The discrepancies infuriated Doug, “Government shits won’t even stop lying now! What’s the goddamn point?”
Alex didn’t engage. His son didn’t used to share his cynicism but being lied to every day about easily checked facts — the fricking temperature — was red-pilling him.
Satellite FM constantly advised people to stay home and wait for openings in shelter tunnels. Mythical government tunnels being excavated (trust us) as we speak. Between repeated admonishments to shelter in place and weather reports, satellite FM filled its broadcast hours with “interviews” of carefree shelter dwellers discussing the good life in the warm tunnels. Just obediently wait, and you will soon be warm and safe. Everything was fine on satellite propaganda FM.
Things differed on the ham and pirate short-wave bands. Tens of millions had already died of exposure, and people frantically begged for help.
While listening, they flipped on the duct fans. They always turned on the duct fans before stoking up or relighting the stainless-steel stove. It had proved necessary to use small, regularly spaced fans in the ducts. The fans initially ran on batteries, but they had to rewire them to run off the powerpacks. With the fans running, Alex fitted their detachable flexible PVC air intake tube to a duct hole they had cut in the box floor. The floor hole exposed a duct running under the box and connecting to the 8-inch air intake duct, which ran to the mine’s exterior. To limit heat loss from pulling freezing outside air into the box, the detachable intake tube was thickly wrapped with rockwool and bubble wrap held in place with duct tape. Alex didn’t like cutting through the floor insulation layers to rig the air intake, but it had to be done. When not in use, they plugged the floor hole with cut pool noodles and covered it with thick rockwool and yoga mats. The PVC tube attached to a metal T-joint hanging on the stove’s air intake vent. With practice, Doug and Alex learned how to burn small amounts of coal and wood without filling the box with smoke. Once going, the flame burned steadily and vented without problems.
After getting the stove going, they poured purified and filtered water from large four-liter thermoses into smaller steel water bottles, which they set on the stove to heat up. When the water in the bottles boiled, Doug screwed on their caps and stored them in a drink cooler he had upgraded by lining its interior with additional Styrofoam insulation. The hot water bottles would remain hot in the jacked-up cooler for a day. Doug used the water to make coffee. And, sometimes, he wrapped the hot bottles in thick socks and used them to warm up sleeping bags.
As the box heated up, Alex checked the silica gel canisters. They had indicators that turned pink when saturated. Pink meant it was time to bake them to drive off water. Today, none of the canisters needed baking.
Next, they ate breakfast. They did most of their cooking in the airlock box, but they started the day with easily prepared breakfast foods. Today, they stove-heated oatmeal, canned ham, and instant coffee whitened with powdered milk. As they consumed food, Alex recorded the items. Weeks ago, he had numbered every food item in their stores and saved the numbers in a spreadsheet. He ticked them off daily; they would probably freeze before starving at current consumption rates.
With breakfast done, they carefully licked the metal camping bowls and cups clean, and then, using as little water as possible, they wiped them down with rags, which they wrung over a pail. Some days, they boiled rags in the airlock and hung them up to dry beside the warm exhaust vent running along the mine shaft ceiling. Doing end-of-the-world dishes is still a pain.
With breakfast done, they sorted trash. Easily burnable materials like cardboard or wrapping paper went into one plastic garbage bag. Unburnable items, like opened cans and glass bottles, went in another bag. Nasty burnables, like plastic wrapping, went in a third bag. By carefully licking plates and bowls, they almost eliminated food waste, but sometimes, they couldn’t hold their bladders and had to pee in a large clear plastic jug. So far, they had managed to hold number two and only took dumps in the “garage” on Doug’s elegantly cut toilet lid. It was necessary to keep the toilet box lid in the airlock and only use it after warming it up. With garage temperatures around -50C, your bare ass would stick to the freezing lid otherwise.
Every time Alex exposed his butt to freezing air, he thought of the old racist joke. “What do boogs want? Loose shoes, a tight pussy, and a warm place to shit.” He’d never appreciated the warm place to shit bit until now.
After breakfast and trash sorting, Alex and Doug split up. Alex always went to the airlock while Doug stayed in the inner box. They both needed some time by themselves. Months of “incarceration,” as Doug called it, wore on them. In their time apart, Alex would either set up his astrograph outside the mine entrance and take CCD images of the sky or spend his mornings melting ice and filtering water, cooking lunch, or baking. Hot bread was their biggest treat. Alex experimented with baking on the airlock stove but found using a propane camping stove worked better. He didn’t like burning the extra propane; they tried to use propane only to run the generators and recharge the powerpacks, but the hot bread always made them feel better.
Doug used his inner box alone time to sew. He patched tears in their clothes and reworked blankets and comforters to augment their parkas, boots, and mittens. Currently, he’s making boots for boots. It was already too cold for their Scheels winter boots. Their toes went numb if they spent more than half an hour outside. By wrapping their boots in thick layered recut nylon down comforter material with soles made of rockwool wrapped in cut bedsheets, Doug hoped to keep their feet warm as temperatures plunged.
To leave the box and give Doug some time alone, Alex squirmed into his second base layer of red Santa Claus underwear, put on his graphene jacket, and checked his jacket battery. He also plugged in the astrograph electric blanket. To control electric devices, they ran extension cords and other wires through the inner box’s walls. The wire port was carefully sealed with rockwool, Styrofoam, and duct tape. The cables connected to propane generators, webcams, motion detectors, vent fans, shaft lights, and the radio antenna. They could all be turned on and off from banks of power bars.
“It’s probably overcast out there. I’ll dump our shit pail and get ice.”
Getting out of the box was a chore. The front of the box was packed with food items, primarily cans, which might be damaged by freezing. They kept many cans in suitcases. Suitcases were easier to move around than piles of loose cans; the remaining cans they put on rude shelves built into the front of the box. They used Alex’s wheeled carry-on as moveable insulation. It contained nonperishable food; they rolled it up against the box door when inside the box.
Alex pushed the carry-on out of the way and crawled through a narrow opening to the small, heavily insulated door. Before opening the door, Doug handed him today’s trash bags, Alex’s log notebook, the night vision monocular, and a trail camera. What they hauled out of the box varied from day to day. Some days, they took empty water thermoses or jugs of pee, and on others, like today, trail cameras. They were down to two trail cameras. One had stopped working when temperatures dropped below -50C, and they had rewired the others to run off powerpacks. Also, it was too cold to fidget with the cameras outdoors. It was easier to take them inside and change memory cards when they warmed up.
“Don’t forget the walkie-talkie old man. What’s all that list checking for?”
Doug handed him a recharged walkie-talkie. They used walkie-talkies for a mine shaft intercom. Months ago, they’d argued about Maxwell Caging the mine’s outer door. Alex wanted to cover the door with aluminum foil to block stray walkie-talkie signals from “escaping” the mine and alerting the deep state. This was too crazy for Doug.
“Are you hearing yourself? You’re one step away from literal tin foil hats.”
Doug won the argument. From the inner box, walkie-talkie signals could barely reach the catchment pond but no further. Still, Alex sparingly used the walkie-talkies; he only sent short, necessary messages.
Alex put the walkie-talkie in one of his graphene jacket’s pockets and then turned off the motion detectors in the mine shaft. To exit, he peeled back the Velcro seals on the door, pushed it open, and eased today’s items out of the box. Moving them aside, Alex crawled out of the box onto a small porch of yoga mats. Doug pulled the door shut behind him.
It was always a scramble to get out of the box and get into his parka, ski pants, and winter boots hung outside. As he put on his outerwear, he did calisthenics to warm himself and his freezing clothes. Eventually, they would have to drag their outerwear into the box. After dressing, he checked the thermometer mounted on a shaft support near the inner box. This morning, it was -15 degrees Celsius: essentially tropical.
Today was a powerpack recharging day; Alex opened the Styrofoam-lined plywood box beside the yoga mat porch they had built to house their propane-powered generators and started one generator. The generators were the only way they could charge their powerpacks. When the propane ran out, their only light would be stove flames. The stoves had nice flameproof glass portals; sometimes, they used stove light to conserve powerpack/propane energy. They weren’t looking forward to when the propane ran out. At current consumption rates, they would be empty in two years. Maybe three if they spent more time in the dark.
They ran one generator at a time, usually the one attached to a 30-pound tank. The generator connected to a 100-pound tank was sparingly used. They held it in reserve in case they had to stay in the mine for extended periods. Both generators connected to duct vents and extension cords running to the powerpacks.
Once the generator was humming, he went to the front of the mine, stooping to avoid knocking his head on the shaft shoring and hanging vent ducts. On the way, he took a quick census of their freeze-proof foods. Fifty-pound bean bags were stacked on a narrow platform they made from wood salvaged from Grampa’s ruined house. They were getting sick of beans.
Before reaching the airlock, he dumped today’s unburnable trash in a large garbage bag. He did the same for the nasty burnables. He left the empty garbage bags on the bean bags to reuse later. Plastic garbage bags are surprisingly durable. Four large metal pails of mine tailings and a cooler filled with mined coal were lined up outside the airlock. It was from yesterday’s mining. After lunch, Alex and Doug worked together on the coal seam.
Stepping around the tailing pails, he unzipped the Velcro seal on the airlock’s back door and went inside. He did the same for the front door. With both doors open, he ferried the tailing pails through the airlock and dumped their contents in the wheelbarrow. He then hauled the empty pails back through the airlock for today’s mining session. With the pails sorted, he carried the cooler full of coal into the box and sealed the doors. Then, using some of the newly mined coal, he lit the stove in the front box.
When the flame burned smoothly, he placed one of the turkey baster pans filled with pond ice on the stove. Their Walmart water was running low; they now collected ice from the catchment pond, which they melted and ran through water purification filters. They collected about two big four-liter steel thermos of purified water daily. Alex tracked how much water they used, like everything else.
With the ice melted and filtering into a large thermos, Alex prepared to open the outer door. Before swinging the outer door open, he took a few multimeter resistance readings. The temperature outside measured about -78 degrees Celsius. Earlier, when he checked the webcams, it didn’t look windy, but he’d been fooled before. He opened the front door of the heat box and let warm air flow into the garage. After fifteen minutes, he grabbed Doug’s toilet lid, which they kept near the airlock stove. The toilet lid felt toasty warm. He stepped into the garage, placed the toilet lid on Doug’s shit box, and defecated into a prepared pail inside the box. Yesterday, he had shoveled a thin layer of mine waste and burnt coal cinders into the pail. If they didn’t do this, their crap would freeze and stick to the metal pail. Banging frozen shit out of pails in -80C weather is not recommended! Today, his stool appeared soft, and his urine looked clear. As a treat, he used some of their dwindling supply of toilet paper to wipe himself. Most days, they used printer paper.
With his business complete, he pulled up his double underwear and thick ski pants, secured his face covering over a disposable face mask, and then turned on the graphene jacket under his oversized parka; it was amazingly warm, even in -80C weather. His last chore before opening the mine was closing the front door of the airlock. This kept frigid air out of the airlock. It also blocked airlock lights from spilling out. Alex didn’t want to be seen. As the graphene jacket warmed his core, he swung the outer door up and tied it open.
A blast of cold assaulted him.
The entrance lay half buried in drifted snow. It was the same every goddamn day. Before stepping outside, he dug the night vision monocular out of his parka and scanned the view to the south for any lights. Nothing appeared: no lights, no stars, nothing. The Earth was getting closer and closer to Jupiter. At its closest approach, Jupiter’s disk would be visible to the naked eye. Jupiter now shone painfully bright in the east, more brilliant than Venus used to be. When he couldn’t see it, the sky was overcast. Overcast skies sucked for sky-watching, but they had a big plus on runaway Earth; they kept the air just a shade warmer.
Tonight, he wouldn’t get out the telescope. On clear nights, he set up the astrograph and took images of Jupiter and Saturn. By measuring their apparent diameters with his laptop sky chart program, Alex could estimate how far Earth was from each planet. Weeks ago, he had calculated how close Earth would come to the outer planets and discovered that it would fly so close to Saturn that the planet’s disk would span about two degrees: four times an old full Moon, and the majestic rings even more. It would be awesome: almost worth freezing everyone on Earth for.
As observing was out tonight, Alex called Doug on the walkie-talkie. “You can unplug the astrograph. It’s overcast.”
Electric blankets drained powerpacks; they carefully limited their use. With the telescope blanket off, he turned to this morning’s chores. First up, shovel the frigging opening. They had inexplicably forgotten to get a snow shovel when apocalypse shopping. Luckily, super cold, newly blown snow is always light and crystalline; it’s easily pushed aside with makeshift shovels. Setting his night vision preserving red headlamp to its lowest setting (the dim red light would be enough to see but too dim to attract attention), he used a plow hacked together from plywood and two-by-fours, to push enough snow aside to finish the job with their largest shovel.
Using the walkie-talkie again, he told Doug, “I’m going out now to switch cameras and get ice.”
Grabbing the trail camera, Alex followed a polypropylene guide rope to the southern antenna pole. Guide ropes made finding things on dark, moonless nights easy. They had three guide ropes. One went to the antenna, another to the active latrine pit, and a third to the frozen catchment pond.
At the antenna pole, he swapped trail cameras. The trail camera redundantly pointed southeast, overlapping with the webcam view, but it ran 24×7, while the webcam only worked when he plugged it into his laptop.
With the camera secure, he followed the guide rope back to the garage, put the frozen trail camera on the astrograph box, and then dragged their makeshift ice sled, loaded with ice-breaking tools, to the frozen solid catchment pond. Using a shovel, Alex exposed the surface of the ice adjacent to where they had previously mined. Working quickly by the dim red headlamp, he sledgehammered ice blocks out of the pond and loaded them on the sled. When he had enough ice to fill two melting pans, he dragged the sled back to the garage.
Before closing the outer mine door, Alex opened their toilet box and fetched the shit pail. Grabbing a hammer, he went outside one more time carrying the pail. Alex followed the guide rope to the active latrine pit. Drifting snow had filled the pit again; they had given up shoveling shit snow, so he dumped the pail and banged it to knock out residual crap. Retreating to the mine’s garage, he replaced the pail in the toilet box and lined its bottom with coal cinders and crushed rock. Making it ready for the next shit. This was not how Alex had imagined the end of the world.
light show
Twenty-five weeks after runaway, as Earth crossed the main asteroid belt, the weather took another turn. For weeks before, relentless streams of high-altitude clouds blocked the skies above the mine. It annoyed Alex; he didn’t appreciate his last observing session being clouded out.
“Would it be too much to ask for a few clear nights before we all die?”
Overcast skies came with ice-crystal snow. Too cold for regular snowstorms, small amounts wafted down as microscopic ice splinters. While dropping, the ice crystals scattered light, erecting perpendicular, hazy glowing pillars. When Jupiter, now so bright it cast shadows, rose in the east, a leading shaft of light bright enough to see on the webcams heralded its rise. If Alex didn’t see it, he didn’t bother heating the astrograph. Why waste precious powerpack and propane energy?
During overcast nights and windy days, they listened to the radio. Government satellite propaganda FM still reported global temperatures but little else. They had given up gaslighting, opting for clandestine silence. Short-wave stations still reported interesting developments, like, for the first time in human history, the Nile River froze. People in equatorial regions couldn’t deal with -45 degrees Celsius cold. Their houses lacked central heating and decent insulation. Public utilities, like water systems, assumed warmth. Water mains broke, flooding streets that the merciless cold turned into ice rinks. Many died of exposure and now starvation. In the past, such misery triggered massive refugee surges, but now, moving north or south only led to colder weather. People tore cities apart to fuel millions of fires. Governments gave up policing and focused their dwindling resources on protecting food supplies. Troops surrounded granaries, rice depots, and corn silos; they shot trespassers.
Ham radio stations started dropping off. In the first runaway months, they found hundreds of hams but now had difficulty finding dozens. The remaining hams either broadcast rambling stream of conscious monologues or attempted to relay news and messages. Relaying emergency information is a longstanding ham tradition, but this wasn’t a typical emergency. Nobody is coming to your aid. Everyone is in distress. Why even bother asking for help? Alex gravitated to sky-watching hams while Doug searched for sources of interesting news.
After weeks of overcast conditions, the skies cleared, and local temperatures dropped to new lows. Copper spool resistance indicated -92 Celsius, colder than old Antarctica record lows.
Radio weather reports claimed the clearing mid-latitude skies resulted from expanding polar ice packs. The northern pack had reached as far south as Astoria, Oregon, and the southern pack marched up the coasts of Chile and Argentina and approached South Africa and Australia. The rate at which the pack ice spread surprised meteorologists. Their models had it moving at about half the observed rate.
Alex couldn’t resist smirking, “Weren’t these the same guys forecasting global warming in tenths of a degree? I’m enjoying the settled science vibe.”
Doug gave his dad a give-it-up look, but Alex let it slide. After half a year in the mine, they both had shaggy beards. Wasting fuel, water, and time on shaving didn’t make sense. Doug’s ragged blond beard and six-foot-five-inch stature made him look like Thor after a bender in Valhalla. According to Doug, Alex’s gray whiskers gave him a wanted poster look. Their daily mining sessions had hardened their bodies. Coal mining with simple hand tools is hard physical work. Doug had ripped arms, and Alex’s soft, pasty, middle-aged body was lean and tight. Both were in better shape than ever and couldn’t resist admiring themselves in tiny first-aid kit mirrors.
As pack ice covered the oceans, the water entering the atmosphere decreased. Seawater became the sole source of atmospheric moisture when other sources like rivers, lakes, and forests froze solid. Soon, the ice packs would meet at the equator, sealing the Earth’s liquid water from the air. As the planet continued to cool, any moisture remaining airborne would freeze out, yielding cloud-free skies. Additionally, with the Sun shrinking and pumping less and less energy into the atmosphere the winds would also quiet down. Earth would soon have perpetual dark, clear, windless skies: an amateur astronomers paradise.
With the clouds gone, Alex’s nights became superbly dark and clear. He looked forward to crawling out of the box. Even Doug, on occasion, would join him observing. The Moon, Alex’s lifetime deep sky nemesis, no longer tormented him, and as the Earth raced out of the inner solar system, auroras also diminished. Increased distance diluted charged particles from the Sun before they hit Earth’s magnetosphere. It would be interesting to see how much longer auroras would be visible. Night after night, Alex witnessed the best dark skies he had ever seen. Human light pollution had vanished. Utility grids couldn’t take extreme cold. Most failed, blacking out vast swathes of the countryside. Being too cold to fix electrical grids, when the lights went out, they stayed out.
It was lovely except for the punishing cold. At current temperatures their best cold weather gear limited their time outside to a few hours. This interval would shrink as temperatures dropped, and they could do little to cope. They had already beefed up their boots and mittens. Doug’s boots in boots kept their feet warm, and they both wore his altered fitted nylon comforters over their thick parkas. Alex spent the most time outside the mine. The electric graphene jacket still worked beautifully under his oversized parka. On some observing nights, he almost forgot about the cold, but they both knew their outside time would continue to shrink.
Two monastery mornings after recording a new low of -94 Celsius, Alex’s clock woke him, and he robotically worked through his morning checklist. Nothing caught his attention until he plugged the webcams into his laptop. The north and south cam views dazzled with blazing spears of light. It must be a bright meteor shower!
He shook Doug awake. Doug worked harder at the coal seam than Alex and was often exhausted at the end of their days. Alex let him sleep in until he left the box. They had agreed to always keep in touch when doing dangerous things, like going outside or working the seam.
“Wake up, look at this!”
Annoyed at first, Doug turned and gave Alex a big grin after looking at the laptop screen.
“Damn!”
Rushing through their chores, they crawled out of the inner box, put on their outerwear, and hurried to the airlock. They didn’t bother lighting the stove. Instead, they squeezed through the airlock and sealed the doors. In the garage, they pulled up and tied the outer mine door open.
Intense meteors filled the entire sky, flashing from the east like line lighting and arc strobing the landscape. Timing streaks with his diving watch, Alex estimated they fell at about two hundred per minute. Some glowed painfully bright, leaving afterimages burnt in your eyes, and he swore he could hear some.
“Did you hear that?” he asked Doug.
“Yeah. How?”
“Sonic booms. They’re all traveling much faster than sound. Must be a Mach cone background.”
The spectacle seized their attention until the bitter cold interrupted. Retreating to the front box, they fetched the electric blanket draped around the astrograph. The blanket felt warm. Alex had flipped it on before leaving the box. Wrapping themselves in the blanket, they returned outside and huddled under the meteor-sliced skies. This show was worth draining a powerpack. The electric blanket provided enough warmth to endure another hour. The shower tapered off. Streak counts dropped to a dozen per minute, but the few coming were just as bright. Then, like a staged fireworks grand finale, a huge, exceptionally bright meteor flashed from the east. It blinded them and grew brighter as it raced over them. Its white glare blasted the entire snow-covered valley. Seconds later, it detonated in the west with a blast so bright it looked like staring into the old Sun.
Stunned, Alex forgot to count down. Soon, an eardrum-shattering shockwave punched through the cold air.
“What the hell, Dad?”
“A large bolide, a meteor exploding in the atmosphere. Cool!”
After the blast, they continued watching, enduring the cold as long as possible, but the -90C air drove them back into the mine. Before crawling into the box, they started up a generator. Their time outside under an electric blanket had depleted a powerpack. Neither of them had the energy to screw around lighting finicky coal fires. So, they turned on Doug’s little electric heater hanging over the tunnel tent. They only ran the heater while the generators were going. Feeling celebratory, they rummaged through their supplies and picked out some favorites. Alex had some canned pork and trail mix bars, and Doug ate his prized canned cheese and freeze-dried apricots. They washed everything down with canned cider and beer.
As Alex sipped his cider, he reiterated, “Good call picking up booze; dry apocalypses are the worst.”
“You know, until the world ended, I didn’t know canned cheese was a thing.”
“You’re getting some queso on your mustache, Thor.”
Finishing their cold dinner, they made hot cocoa with a stashed hot bottle and powdered milk and then snuggled into their sleeping bags at midnight (solar noon) and listened to the radio.
The meteor shower put on a global show. Even propaganda satellite FM spent time on it. There were bolide airbursts worldwide and some surface impacts, with the biggest taking out half a city block in downtown Lima. The Lima meteorite measured only three or four meters in diameter but slammed into the city at eighty thousand kilometers per hour. Do the kinetic energy math. Kaboom!
Sky-watching radio hams weren’t surprised by the shower: many expected showers. After all, the Earth was crossing the main asteroid belt. Even God Radio had learned a few astronomical tricks. God Radio prophesied the Earth would slam into a big belt asteroid. Freezing our asses wasn’t enough. God was going to pound our bungholes like a fisting dominatrix with a baseball bat. Yeah, God Radio still wasn’t pussyfooting around.
A few wondered why so many meteors flashed through Earth’s skies when a dozen spacecraft had safely navigated the main asteroid belt without hitting anything. Others pointed out the big difference between the Earth and tiny spacecraft. A few hundred meteors per minute over a terrestrial hemisphere needs only a few randomly scattered baseball-sized asteroids every ten kilometers. A tiny Voyager or a larger Juno spacecraft would likely traverse such a region of space without hitting anything, while the Earth would plow into thousands. The collision statistics resemble the Battleship game played on vast grids.
Meteor showers continued sporadically for the next three weeks but feebly gave way to pure dark skies, with the main attraction being Jupiter. Their naked eyes resolved Jupiter’s disk and the Galilean Moons. In binoculars, Jupiter’s equatorial and mid-latitude cloud belts prominently stood out. His astrograph digital images looked like space telescope shots. If it wasn’t for the intense cold, now sometimes dipping below -100C, Alex would have snapped hundreds of Jupiter images and stacked the best of them with his laptop astro imaging software to produce legitimate masterpieces, but he couldn’t stay outside long enough. Still, the few shots he processed were the best images of Jupiter he had ever taken.
“You’re really good at this, Dad.”
And as the Earth approached, the pictures kept getting better.
Thirty-eight weeks after runaway, the Earth made its closest approach to Jupiter. Jupiter’s disk gleamed as a tiny, banded ball of brilliance to the naked eye. Astrograph images were spectacular! Only orbiting spacecraft shots were better. Alex was so grateful Doug was with him. Sharing his superb Jupiter images with his son almost made him cry. He wanted to share them on social media. A year ago, he did. It didn’t seem important then, but now, nobody would ever see or like anything he ever did again.
At forty-two weeks, Earth crossed Jupiter’s orbit. Crossing revealed another never-before-seen spectacle, Jupiter as a crescent in Earth’s skies. For all of history, Jupiter has been an outer planet, always a disk in our scopes. Now, Jupiter glowed like a gigantic Venus, a new inner planet. It would fade as Earth moved further and further away. Eventually, the great gas giant would be a faint star, then nothing to the eye. No more king of the gods in our skies. No more observers on Earth to care.
Passing Jupiter marked a Rubicon. With the great giant shrinking in Earth’s skies, whatever hope survivors on runaway Earth harbored vanished; a year of relentless, ever-accelerating cooling had rendered the planet unrecognizable. There would be no return to normal. Warm winds would never blow on Earth again. Global food stores were near exhaustion, with no way to replenish them. They heard some of this on the radio but inferred the rest. Radio stations of all types, including government, short-wave, and ham stations, started disappearing. On some days, they only heard static. A few hams started broadcasting repeating messages in Morse code. They decoded some of these messages; many pleaded for help or served as radio memorials. As station operators died, some rigged their transmitters to broadcast coded epitaphs. The messages cycled until the power failed.
Life kept getting harder and harder. Mineshaft air temperatures kept falling as the residual heat in the surrounding rock bled away. The mine wasn’t deep enough to benefit from the Earth’s heat. Deep mines, a kilometer or deeper, would be toasty and warm, but the rock around them only served as a thick layer of insulation. It would eventually reach thermal equilibrium with the outside. Outside temperatures hung around -97 Celsius and continued to fall. Soon, the cold would penetrate the mine. He figured in two years, it would be -90C in the mine and -160C outside. It’s unlikely they could survive such temperatures.
To trap as much stove heat as possible they rerouted the exhaust vent of the airlock stove to loop back into the mine shaft before turning and venting outside. Using more aluminum foil, they wrapped the looped exhaust and intake pipes. The foil functioned as a radiator, bleeding exhaust heat into the shaft. It also helped warm intake air. In a final touch, they mounted their remaining vent fans outside the pipes. The fans directed cold shaft air over the warm exhaust pipe and pushed the slightly warmed air deeper into the mine. If they maintained fires in both stoves for twelve hours, their vent hack warmed shaft air about 10 degrees Celsius. Instead of working in -30C temperatures, they worked in -20C. Burning two fires for longer periods required more and more mining. Every day, Alex logged their coal consumption in a spreadsheet. In six months, mining every waking hour wouldn’t be enough.
“It was not sustainable, Duh!”
Analyze the Data not the Drivel 