CHAPTER 215: CHAPTER 213: ON THE WAY

Although the tracked chassis has many advantages and is more suitable for advancing in snow, the biggest issue with tracks compared to wheels is that they don’t move fast enough.

Add to that the car itself is already heavy enough, with a maximum speed of only eighty kilometers per hour, even if Chen Xin overloads the engine and pumps in twice the electrical power, it can only reach one hundred sixty.

The overload mode is used in emergencies, Chen Xin can’t easily enable it, and after activating the overload mode, it leads to significant wear and tear on the tracks, engine, transmission, and even the car body, which is unsustainable.

And the theoretical maximum speed at that time can only be achieved on flat and unobstructed roads while driving in a straight line. With the current complex road conditions and poor visibility, the speed Chen Xin is maintaining is only fifteen kilometers per hour, which is just the vehicle’s speed, not his movement speed on the map.

Given the current environment, the original roads are buried under more than a meter of snow, and the surrounding environment has changed beyond recognition, making it impossible to follow the original roads. Chen Xin can only confirm his position by checking the map while waiting for the drone and radar to scan the surrounding road condition information before deciding how to proceed.

Sometimes, even though it may be only a hundred meters in a straight line, due to a large meteor pit in the middle of the road, he has to go several hundred meters for a detour, which naturally takes a lot of time.

So it seems like a speed of fifteen kilometers per hour, but in reality, on the map, moving ten kilometers per hour is already difficult.

"Another meteor pit? How many have I encountered today?" Chen Xin couldn’t help but complain. Through radar and drone scanning, there is another meteor pit over fifty meters in diameter in front, forcing him to take a detour.

Although the off-road performance of the tracks is good, directly going down and climbing the pit is doable, if there is a flat road, Chen Xin prefers not to climb pits.

This section of the road, Chen Xin has not let the operating system automatically drive but is holding the steering wheel himself, cautiously moving forward.

Automatic driving is convenient, but the intelligent level of the operating system installed in the car is not high enough; for road condition recognition and route planning, it only ensures the car can pass. So yesterday, when Chen Xin let it drive automatically, it drove into the meteor pits on the road several times.

Although relying on the car’s inherent climbing ability, these meteor pits covered by snow do not obstruct Chen Xin’s progress, sitting in the car, the bumps caused by climbing the pits make him very uncomfortable.

If possible, he would rather take more detours to walk on flat ground.

However, speaking of meteor pits, you don’t notice it at home, although the city area has houses destroyed by meteor impacts, meteor pits are not too common.

But after he went out, Chen Xin found that there are quite a few meteor pits on the road. On average, he encounters a meteor pit every one or two hours.

These meteor pits mostly range in diameter from dozens of meters to over a hundred meters, mostly formed by the debris from falling meteors.

Originally, to block the meteors from hitting Blue Star, Lucia guided the nuclear bombs launched by the Five Powers to bombard the meteors. Although they couldn’t completely shatter the meteors, they did blast down quite a bit of debris.

This debris did not fall directly onto the surface of Blue Star but temporarily floated in near-earth orbit, like space junk around Blue Star.

Some of them would gradually fall to the surface over time, while others would remain floating in near-earth orbit forever. The debris that fell to the Blue Star’s surface mostly burned out in the sky when passing through the atmosphere.

Even the debris that could reach the surface is not large, and the craters created by the fall are these "small pits" ranging from dozens of meters to over a hundred meters.

In fact, from the start of the meteor impact on Blue Star to the present half-year period, the dust created by the impact has been continuously falling from the sky. Although it still remains pitch black without a trace of sunlight, more and more dust is falling with time, and eventually, sunlight will penetrate the clouds.

But this time may be very long, and in the short term, the surface can only recover to a dim light environment, not the current lightless condition.

If the surface could recover to a dim light environment, human survival conditions might improve, right?

Chen Xin controlled the steering wheel, maneuvered around the meteor pit, then switched back to automatic driving mode, pondering this issue himself.

Sunlight is extremely important to both humans and all life on the surface; it’s fair to say that where there’s sunlight, there’s life.

Compared to cold, the absence of sunlight is the greatest problem. After all, historically on Blue Star, temperatures often fall to minus sixty or seventy degrees during winter, even in cold Siberia, there’s a dense forest, so cold doesn’t cause the extinction of life.

But without sunlight, the vast majority of life cannot survive.

So if the surface could recover to a faint light environment, Chen Xin believes that even if the surface is covered by temperatures of minus dozens of degrees and snow and ice, there would still be traces of life slowly recovering.

However, this recovery process would be extremely lengthy, long enough to use centuries as the unit of measurement.

Historically, periods when the entire ecosystem was destroyed and species nearly extinct on Blue Star were not uncommon, including times when global temperatures fell to minus dozens of degrees, scientists term such extreme cold climate phases as ice ages.

Blue Star has seen two most famous ice ages.

One occurred approximately one million years ago during the Pleistocene, when humans were just beginning to evolve; due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, a thick ice sheet covered the entire North Atlantic continental edges.

The other was about twenty-one thousand years ago, when most of North America and Europe were covered by ice layers up to two kilometers thick, causing sea levels to drop by one hundred twenty meters. This harshest ice age in five hundred million years affected at least thirty percent of Blue Star’s surface.

However, neither of these ice ages was as dramatic and brutal as the global ice age events that occurred between eight hundred million and five hundred and fifty million years ago.

From approximately eight hundred million to five hundred fifty million years ago, the entire surface of Blue Star, from poles to the equator, froze entirely, leaving only small amounts of liquid water on the sea floor. At that time, Blue Star was completely frozen, referred to as "Snowball Earth" by scientists.

Regarding the reasons for "Snowball Earth," whether sunlight was reverse-blocked, a mass production of icy gases, or ice sheets reflecting sunlight, there are many causes.

But no matter the cause of "Snowball Earth," at that time, Blue Star’s surface was entirely covered by thick ice sheets, with only the ice layers in the equatorial region thinner to several meters.

Therefore, for Blue Star itself, extreme cold climates are not a problem, nor can they completely extinguish life.

However, for humans and other organisms living on Blue Star’s surface, this is a natural disaster that can lead to the extinction of everything.

Currently, Blue Star’s surface has rapidly cooled due to the sun being blocked, coupled with the previous meteor strikes evaporating a large amount of surface water. With these two effects, the surface is completely covered by snow and ice, resembling the environment during the "Snowball Earth" phase of Blue Star.

In such cold conditions, even the oceans are frozen, and before the dust scatters and sunlight returns to the Blue Star’s surface, the entire planet has already been frozen into a snowball.

This means that even if normal sunlight is restored, the reflection of sunlight from the surface’s ice and snow would still make it difficult for the temperature to rise. Extreme cold weather may persist for a lengthy period, measured by Blue Star itself as a reference.

"This really is not something to be happy about!" Though how long the extreme cold winter lasts, whether it’s one hundred or one million years, makes no difference to Chen Xin, this is a reality that’s hard to be cheerful about.

The long night might end quickly, but the cold won’t.

Humans may have to wait a long time before seeing the warmth of spring flowers.

Perhaps humanity can revisit old times by building greenhouses, but to once again see green mountains, blue waters, and blue skies and white clouds, it will be a lengthy wait.

However deep thought on such matters should be the work of scientists; it holds no significance for Chen Xin personally.

Perhaps in the future, he could use the system’s power to build a planet transformer, altering the planetary environment to make Blue Star’s ice and snow melt ahead of schedule, returning the environment to pre-disaster conditions, or even transforming Blue Star into Gaia Planet, but that is a matter for the future.

For the current Chen Xin, it’s more practical to consider where to rest at night.

Glancing at the map on the console and the records on the display screen, Chen Xin’s driving distance today has been about one hundred fifty kilometers, but the straight-line move on the map is less than forty kilometers, it means he hasn’t gone very far.

The main reason for covering only forty kilometers of straight-line distance is due to encountering issues with the elevated highway section’s destruction, forcing Chen Xin to turn back a large section before exiting the highway to bypass the destroyed area.

This detour undoubtedly wasted a lot of time, if there were no detours, according to Chen Xin’s estimate, today he should have covered ten more kilometers in a straight-line distance.

But in Chen Xin’s view, it’s better slow but sure than can’t move.

As long as one can progress, walking slowly will eventually arrive; if the road ahead is blocked, that’s the most headache-inducing matter.

After driving to a wind-sheltered depression, parking and deploying the eight support picks from the bottom of the car to fix the chassis and body as securely as possible, Chen Xin left the driver’s seat and entered the living module, intending to make dinner for himself.