This ones for you, student who will rename nameless from the TDSB, who asked me to break apart Minecraft even more, their favorite video game, and how it would be in the real world; after he heard and recognized me from of all things, a radio interview I did, on the same subject! So here we go! Round 2. FIGHT!
Before we begin: We’re going to focus on the idea of the world that the video game creates among other things it does, rather than the platform we’re playing on. It will be an average design which may not be exact to “X” platform vs. “Y” platform, so just relax the mind as you read this further. Also, some previous reading, which may now be inaccurate with how much the game has changed (I did write it back in…… 2015-ish?): ESS’s First Minecraft Post
First, we do need to breakdown some basic info for the people that have been living under a Cobblestone Brick their whole lives. Minecraft, which started as a PC Game experiment made by a few people, beginning with Markus “Notch” Perrson. This video game started in 2009, and as of June 2024, it’s reported that the game has 166 MILLION active users. That’s more than Fortnite and Roblox, combined. It is used in educational settings to teach everything from Science, Math and interpersonal skills, to helping develop those with accessible needs. It has now expanded to many more platforms, almost every home based console like Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo, is on almost every Mobile platform like Apple and Android, and can even be played on some standalone equipment – there’s Minecraft dedicated consoles out there, to even some people playing the game on ridiculous things with electronics, like a Samsung Smart Fridge:
Everything in the Minecraft universe, outside of a very select few items, is perfectly cubed: It is even on every side, and is 1 meter exactly. This makes the mathematics so much easier for me! The player, “Steve”, is known to be 1.8 meters tall, or 6 foot 2 inches. What’s more amazing, is Steve’s athletic ability. From a stand still, the average male can jump 15 inches, with the females leading out to averaging 17 inches, go ahead and measure now with your class or by yourself how tall you can jump from a stand still, because Steve can jump higher than Michael Jordan at his prime which is 46 inches or just shy of 117cm (Sorry LeBron, you only hit 106cm!). He also can do that from a stand-still while MJ and LeBron needed a running start. However we’re just getting started with how amazing Steve’s commitment to leg day is, because his upper body routine will put all of you to shame.
In Minecraft, as we learned, everything is 1m3. Gravity is not normal though (we will cover this in a future post!), because Steve can carry this inside his pocket. It must have a dimensional portal like a T.A.R.D.I.S., because in total, he has 36 of these “pockets”, and each of those pockets can hold 64 blocks of the same item. Let’s go rescue our friend from the opening paragraph from under that Cobblestone Block, which as we know, is 1m3, which on Earth, would weight 2 700kg, or 5,950 pounds. Just two (2) of these blocks, would weigh more than the one long yellow school bus! Each pocket can hold a minimum of 172,800 kg if we stuff them rocks, or 32 School Busses. That means Steve can casually hold and not struggle while carrying a minimum of 6 220 800 kg of rocks. That’s about 3 fully loaded Space Shuttles ready to launch. We’ll get more into this later, and talk density and valuations.
Before we wrap up, let’s talk about the world Steve lives in. Every time you create a new world, the world is generated like a deck of cards being shuffled. If you and your friend go to the lab today to play Minecraft, and you both generate a new world to play in, and you both click the create button at the exact same millisecond, you have a 1 in 264 chance to get into the physically identical world. That’s 1 in 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 Quintillion) chances of getting the same “planet”, or world.
Wait, planets? Is this world a cubed planet? Why yes, yes it is. Flat Earther’s rejoice! Your “planet” is flatter than a pancake! If you build a stack of cobblestone all the way up to as high as the game will let you build, you’ll be 384m high, which isn’t that tall considering the CN Tower is 533m tall.
If you dig down, you can go to a maximum depth of 64m, which makes each planet 448m thick in size. The width however, that’s the big boy. Each world can stretch 30 MILLION meters in either direction from where you pop into the world. That makes each world 60 million meters wide, or about 1.5x the size of Earth, which if we flattened our ROUND planet to 448m in thickness, you’d have 6x the surface area.
But wait, there’s more! Act know, and get 2 more dimensions: The End, and The Nether. In this universe, each planet has a “hell” below it, and a place we’ll pretend is above it called “The End”. They’re the same size equally, despite the compression in physical size (more on this in a few weeks!). If we stack them side by side, that’s 180 million km, or a non-return trip to our Sun, which is 150 million km away on average. Say hi to BepiColombo, a Mercury targeted NASA mission currently in flight, expected to enter orbit next Christmas, 2025!
Coming soon, we’re going to explore more on these worlds, how big and massive they are, and we’re going to touch on gravity as well as weight, but that’ll come in a few weeks from now. It’s almost Five Percent Friday as I type this and we all know, on Fridays, we only give 5% effort, right? Enjoy!