There was another loud crash, but unlike the previous two times, it seemed to come from within us, bursting through our eardrums to the outside, as huge waves contracted our every cell, and in the searing waves of heat, we were plunged into a red glow emitted from the air around us that filled every inch of space in the mine. Then the glow disappeared, and everything plunged into darkness.

“Few people have actually seen a methane explosion, since it’s hard to survive one in the mines.” The teacher’s disembodied voice echoed in the darkness.

“Why did people used to come to such a terrible place?” a student asked.

“For this,” the teacher said, holding a chunk of black rock into the light from our headlamps, where its innumerable facets sparkled. That was the first time I saw solid coal.

“Children, what we just saw was a mid-twentieth-century coal mine. There were a few new machines and technologies after that, such as hydraulic struts and huge shearers, which went into use in the last two decades of the century and improved conditions somewhat for the workers, but coal mines remained an incredibly dangerous, awful working environment. Until …”

It turned dull after that. The teacher lectured us on the history of gasified coal, which was put to use eighty years ago, when oil was nearly exhausted and major powers mobilized troops to seize the remaining oil fields. The Earth was on the brink of war, but it was gasified coal that saved the world…. We all knew this, so it was boring.

Then we toured a modern mine. Nothing special, just all those pipes we see every day, leading out from underground into the distance, although it was the first time I went inside a central control building and saw a hologram of the burn. It was huge. And we saw the neutrino sensors and gravity-wave radar monitoring the underground fire, and laser drills … all pretty boring, too.

The teacher recounted the history of the mine, and said that over a century ago, it had been destroyed in an uncontrolled fire that burned for eighteen years before going out. In those days our beautiful city was a wasteland where smoke blotted out the sky, and all the people had left. There were many stories of the cause of the fire; some people said it had been started by an underground weapons test, and others said it was connected to Greenpeace.

We don’t have to be nostalgic for the so-called good old days. Life in those days was dangerous and confusing. But we shouldn’t be depressed about today, either. Because today will one day be referred to as the good old days.

People really were stupid in the past, and they really had a tough time.

1 The Ministry of Coal Industries was abolished in 1998, some of its functions replaced by the State Administration for Coal Industries.

2 The highest of eight working-class wage levels adopted nationwide in the 1950s.