The Nether: the final frontier...
oh wait that's the End-
FU- *BLEEPS*
The Nether: the second frontier.
Land of lava, rocks that burns indefinitely,
sunburned skeletons, mushrooms, and creepy ghosts;
and the only place where space-time bends, contorts
and makes NO SENSE!
LITERAL HELL!
And it's the subject of today's
SCIENCE!
Because there's one tiny aspect of the Nether
that elevates it from merely a place to farm wither skulls
and *Dr. Evil impression* liquid hot magma
to a place of serious interest that secretly
DO-O-OMS the entire rest of the Minecraft world,
and that is this;
the Nether Portal.
Confused? Stick around and let me elucidate the problem
using the powers of math and three theoretical physicists:
Bubbles, Blossom and But- *BEEP*
Lawrence, Schwarzschild and Einstein.
*INTERLUDE*
Okay, so why am I fixated on the Nether?
Because my brain is broken and I'm not a normal person
but no matter how much Zoloft I take,
my brain never stops behaving this way.
"Then why don't you stop taking Zoloft, Austin?"
Because then I'd be DEPRESSED in doing the same CRAP!
I have resigned to accept the fact that my brain is never going to just enjoy video games normally ever again.
BUT, the key to why I'm obsessed with the Nether,
like I said before, is the Nether Portals.
The obsidian doorways from the main Minecraft world
that allow you to get to the Nether and back again.
Because these things have dramatically terrifying implications,
and I promise you, it's not in the way that you're thinking...
Whichever way you're thinking, it's wrong.
It's not a bomb.
It's not going to kill you directly,
but what it does, what it means, and how it operates
gives us a massive insight into the cosmology of Minecraft,
and the cosmology is Freakin Terrifying.
And in order to understand why, you're gonna first have to know exactly how Nether Portals work.
Nether Portals are made from either obsidian you've mined,
or they can be cast from lava directly,
they frame a two block by three block window,
and, if you're a LOSER, you can omit the corners,
but I hate the way that looks, so I always take the time to harvest enough obsidian to make the full rectangle.
Then, all you need to do is light a fire and
BAM, doorway to another time and place opens up before your very eyes,
pretty... standard stuff.
The cool part comes from the Nether's ability to act as a nexus of fast travel.
Because, it turns out, that every single block you travel in the Nether
translates into eight blocks travelled in the Minecraft overworld.
Meaning, if you travel a mere 100 blocks in the Nether and build a new portal,
it'll spawn 800 blocks further in the same direction,
allowing you to travel vast distances in 1/8 the time it would ordinarily take you.
AND it's this fact alone that utterly and completely dooms the Minecraft world.
Because the only way to make eight meters in one place equal one meter somewhere else,
the ONLY WAY to make that happen
is to stretch space-time.
Which requires one thing:
energy.
And trust me,
it takes a LOT of energy.
*INTERLUDE*
We'll get to that money shot later.
First, I have to explain a few things.
Like, what the heck I even mean,
why, how and what makes this an utterly terrifying proposition with disastrous implications.
Because I have the sense that some of you are like:
"Ohh, so you can make stargates, so what?"
But by the time we're done with this episode,
you'll not only understand what makes this reality of the cosmology of the Minecraft world utterly horrifying,
but you'll also understand Einstein's theories of general and special relativity a hell of a lot better.
Ok, the basics.
For our purposes here today, light is a wave.
For a long time we thought it behaved like all other objects,
and that its velocity was variable depending upon the speed of the observer.
But it turns out, no.
Light always travels at the same speed from all frames of reference,
no matter whether you're travelling toward where it emits from,
or away from where it emits from,
or bisecting where it emits from.
Discovering this had all sorts of weird implications for science.
Implications everyone ignored, except for one dude
named Albert Einstein, who is like:
"Hey, what if we didn't though?"
And while trying to explain how light could move the same speed across all reference frames,
he came up with a whole new field of theoretical physics:
general and special relativity.
These theories actually fixed a lot of problems for us,
but they also suggested that time would be experienced differently between two observers
depending upon, well, basically, two things:
speed and gravity.
Or more specifically, speed and mass.
Gravity just so happens to be an interesting consequence of something that has a lot of mass,
bending space-time around itself.
Einstein proved that time is flexible,
but that it also is directly linked to space and the curve thereof.
Curve space and you also stretch time and vice-versa.
And all of this applies to Minecraft.
Because we're going to use two different, albeit similar, formulas
to calculate the space-time curvature of the Nether
that would cause it to be running eight seconds faster than the Minecraft world,
and, finally, to prove that each and every single Minecraft world you create
is utterly and completely doomed.
*INTERLUDE*
I'm choosing to use time based formulas because they're... easier,
but don't worry, I double-checked it later when I had a panic attack using Lorentz Contraction
and, well, you'll just have to see.
In order to make a one stretch out to an eight between Minecraft and the Nether,
one of them has to be doing something relativistic.
Strong gravity, fast speeds - something.
The first hurdle in general and special relativity is to figure out which of these two places is moving faster,
or has higher energy.
Which is honestly a bit tricky.
But, thankfully, I did the thinking for you.
It's the main Minecraft overworld, and let's look at this simply.
In one dimension eight overworld blocks can fit into the space of one Nether block.
This means, in effect, that the overworld is undergoing space-time compression,
which means, it has more energy.
This is going to be important for positioning in our formulas.
One possibility is that the Minecraft world is flying away from the Nether at a high rate of speed.
But this is... problematic,
mostly because travelling to and from each world
would require exponentially increasing amounts of energy every second.
What's far more likely is that the Nether and the Minecraft world are orbiting the same body.
This is going to allow them to remain a relatively short distance apart from one another,
while allowing us to inject more or less as much energy into the Minecraft world as we need
by raising the mass of the body it's orbiting,
or sending the Nether into a further orbit and bringing the Minecraft world into a lower orbit.
This gives us two ways to calculate what could possibly slow Minecraft time down,
so much that eight seconds in it's world fit into one second of the Nether's.
The first way we're gonna do it is the first way I did it,
which is to take this system, this orbiting solar system
and figure out how deep into a given star's gravity well the Minecraft world would have to be,
in order to be running eight whole seconds slower than the Nethers world.
This is something that we know for a fact exists in real life.
Satellites orbiting the Earth have clocks that tick at a different rate than our own,
and we have to correct for it.
And the orbit of Mercury was slightly off for YEARS until we learned to factor in relativity,
which explained it perfectly.
And if you were to, uh... stand on the surface of the Sun, and, like...
not die somehow,
every five and a half Earth days your Sun-proof watch would get one second behind the same watch on Earth.
All because of gravity.
Now, in order to figure this out, we need to take this colossal mess of a formula,
the Swartchild factor,
and turn it into something that spits out an orbital height for our Minecraft world,
based on the mass of the star it and the Nether are rotating around,
because we actually already know our gamma.
It's eight!
What we want to know is r₂ - the radius.
To save us all time because I have, like, a hundred formulas to get through
and I don't need anybody having the same aneurysms I did,
it simplifies to this.
The radius of the Nether's orbit actually doesn't matter that much for reasons that'll become clear later,
so I'm gonna just reverse engineer it to be the same orbital speed as the Earth.
Plugging in all of our numbers, we should get the orbital radius,
a.k.a. the distance away from the center of any given object our Minecraft world would have to be
in order to be running eight seconds slower than the Nether.
Let's figure out the answer if Minecraft were orbiting our Sun.
We get..
*46.87 meters*
that... that's buried in the Sun,
but it gets... better, because all the mass of the body it's orbiting has to be below it,
meaning the Sun would have to be squashed into a radius of 46 meters,
making it less than a football field wide.
That's over 2500 meters smaller than the Swartchild radius,
which is the radius under which the mass of a given body will be overcome by the power of gravity
and collapse into a black hole.
Meaning, if our Minecraft world were orbiting this,
it'd be about a microsecond away from being de-molecularised by tidal forces.
GREAT!!!
*INTERLUDE*
Okay, okay, okay.
So, maybe... we can dilate time another way.
Maybe, using speed.
And for THAT, we need this formula -
the Lorenz factor.
It's worth pointing out that we can already assume that its speed is gonna be so fast
that orbiting a regular star ain't gonna cut it.
Minecraft cannot follow this basic astronomical bobble.
Instead, it's far more likely that Minecraft takes place in a binary system.
Where the overworld orbits its own Sun,
the one you see in the sky every day,
and that Sun is orbiting something that has even stronger gravity,
and it's conceivable that this could be a neutron star that you can't even see.
They're... pretty tiny.
Anyway, the formula from before,
the Lorentz factor, becomes this,
where we can just plug in all our numbers
and we can find out how fast you'd have to be traveling in relation to the Nether
to get an eight fold compression in space-time.
And the answer?
*297,448,591.15 meters per/second*
*99.22% Speed of Light*
All right, cool beans.
No big deal!
We'll just plop our Minecraft system around...
Oh... I don't know,
the Wolf-Rayet star R136a1.
One of the most massive known stars in existence.
What... what will the orbital radius have to be in order to reach these speeds?
*READS OUT*
And yeah, the Schwarzschild radius is 930 thousand meters.
DANG IT, A BLACK HOLE AGAIN!!!
DEEP, DEEP IN A BLACK HOLE.
NOT EVEN VERY FAR FROM THE SINGULARITY!
GRAAGH!!!
*INTERLUDE*
Okay, okay, okay,
I'm fine whatever, alright, alright, alright, we're good.
FINE!
Fine!
So, Minecraft is orbiting a star that's falling toward a black hole at a high fraction of the speed of light,
and the Nether is out here... somewhere.
Okay. All right.
Let's just accept this as a given.
That in order for space-time to compress this much you have to be past the point of no return.
And with a massive enough black hole
you wouldn't necessarily die right away,
since the curve of space-time before the singularity would be pretty gradual.
It would just be steep enough that light can't escape it.
Ya know what, UHHHHHHH
I can work with this.
But herein becomes the crux of the problem.
How is the Nether Portal even getting there?
It could be a wormhole.
Bending space-time is a perfectly legitimate way to move to and pass the Schwarzschild radius.
If you could actually manage to pull it off.
The issue is the total amount of energy this would take.
Remember, in order for each second in the Nether to be worth one second in the regular overworld,
the overworld has to be traveling at 99.22% the speed of light,
which means you, in effect, would have to reach that speed.
Well... sort of.
At these speeds energy becomes a lot more... um, like... indistinguishable from speed itself.
And... anyway.
Here we can use Einstein's famous E=mc² formula
to figure out exactly how much energy it would take to transport you from Minecraft to the Nether.
BUT, we're gonna actually have to use the whole thing.
The part that uses momentum.
*E²=(mc²)²+PC²* (My brain hurts from reading that)
which becomes
E=mc²+√PC* (Still confused)
This is how we find P, plug in our numbers and
BAM
5.39 Exajoules.
Which is equivalent to 1288 ME-GA-tons of TNT. (YEESH!)
Enough power to power South Korea for an entire year and energy equal to, no joke,
detonating every single nuclear bomb on Earth simultaneously.
This is per trip to and from the Nether.
Can you even imagine each Nether Portal should be utterly melting the world
every time you use it.
Unless it is perfectly designed to use energy and not waste anything as heat or a kinetic energy or anything.
And that's, like, per second, since the Nether Portal is always open once you make it.
The power requirements of this thing are astronomical,
BUT, if somehow the Nether Portal doesn't obliterate the world like a Death Star,
you may have noticed there's a slight problem
of Minecraft's world having to be LITERALLY
IN A FREAKING BLACK HOLE!
What the heck do we even do about this?
You can't orbit the singularity once you're past the Schwarzschild radius.
There's no more orbiting to be done.
Right at the radius the orbital speed is a speed of light,
so while the Minecraft world would delay its impact slightly
by moving sideways at a fraction of C,
it's going to eventually hit the singularity.
If we say that Minecraft's overworld and Sun are within the universe's largest known black hole, TON 618
which clocks in at 66 billion times the mass of our own Sun,
at these speeds the clock is ticking.
On the Minecraft world, given this speed at this height,
you've got, like, tops 92 Earth hours,
or maybe about four days until you're ripped apart by violent gravitational tidal forces.
And before you've even reached that point,
the gravity from the black hole will start bending the life-giving light given by the Sun away from the planet,
eventually making the planet go dark.
Don't worry about freezing to death, though,
because minutes later the last thing you'll see before you die is the Earth lighting on fire
due to the overwhelming tidal forces from the approaching singularity
as it crumbles around your corpse as it gets stretched into thin particle wide ribbons.
THE END IS NIGH!
And what's worse, every time you're in the Nether,
that death clock is ticking eight, EIGHT freaking seconds faster.
Effectively quartering a quarter of the amount of time your world has left.
Paradoxically, this makes the Nether one of the safest places in the game,
and a wonderful place to escape to before the world collapses in on itself.
Better start hoarding now,
and if you're anything like me playing Minecraft,
those 92 hours of game time will happen before you even realize it.
Anyway, here's a Lorentz Contraction spitting out the exact same numbers as time dilation,
a happy accident that proves that
a) Space and time are linked and that everything I said is correct.
b) Probably should have just used Lorentz Contraction to begin with.
and c) Always, ALWAYS double-triple check your work when dealing with relativity.
Oh, and always have a go-bag ready near your Nether Portal
for when the world around you eventually collapses in on itself.
You'll know it's time when the Sun doesn't rise in the morning.
Sincerely,
Austin.