Dear Mojang,
Hi!
It’s me!
Austin!
Are you fucking ready?
Buckle your seatbelt, strap on your tinfoil hat, and douse yourself in Illuminati repellant
because today we’re going off the rails and into the wild, wild world of your hit
game Minecraft and it is simultaneously fucking awesome and will blow your GOD.
DAMNED.
MINDS.
I’ve been getting questions about Minecraft ever since I started this series, asking me
to cover everything from whether or not you could actually mine diamonds with a steel
pickaxe given that diamonds are harder than I am when Muffet pours me a cup of spiders,
to asking me to explain how it would be possible to have an infinite supply of water or lava.
So here goes:
While it’s true that diamonds are one of the hardest allotropes of carbon in existence,
diamonds aren’t actually just solid 1 cubic meter of diamond brick in the ground, they
actually form deeeeeeeeeeep beneath the surface of the earth, where it’s super fucking hot
and the pressure is super fucking high.
They’re then brought to the surface by what’s called Kimberlite Eruptions.
They can actually reach as high as 16 meters below the surface.
Then it’s just an issue of digging them out.
Ironically, in some cases you’d actually be able to mine for diamonds just using a
regular old shovel.
BOOM, CONFIRMED LEGIT.
In the case of infinite wells of lava, and water, that’s some fucking bullshit.
BOOM, ROASTED.
Then instead of doing the world’s shortest episode ever, I was like, “What else can
I look at?”
Then the question struck me: could the world of Minecraft actually exist?
I mean, as a planet, could it?
Measuring gravity due to acceleration, the surface area of the minecraft world, which
is 600% the size of our earth’s surface area, and doing a wee bit of math, over the
course of several days I was able to build a complete planetary profile for the Planet
that generates whenever you start a new game of Minecraft.
And?
Well, it’s actually pretty fucking cool.
While the minecraft planet is over 500% the mass of our own Earth, due to its greater
surface area, and therefore volume, it’s actually significantly less dense, given that
it actually has a much lower gravitational pull on the surface.
Then I asked myself: could a planet with this low-density-high-mass exist IRL?
Yup.
Thanks to the Kepler Project and the analytical work done by Scientists across the globe pouring
over thousands of identified exoplanets in our galaxy, over a dozen planets with similar
gravitational profiles exist out there.
They’re called “Super Earths,” because they’re bigger than the Earth, but smaller
than gas giants, not because they wear skirts and go around fighting Galactic Crime and
god DAMN I am full of Sailor Moon references this month.
I’m just making up for dropping the ball on the Madoka Magicka references when I mentioned
entropy a while back.
At this point, you may be asking yourself “wtf, Austin?
Where’s the foreplay?
You just gonna drop an entire episode’s worth of info on us in the first couple of minutes?
Where’s the hemming?
Where’s the hawing?
What the fuck does Geralt’s Dick look like?”
Good question, hypothetical viewer I just made up!
Well, I was making an episode about allllll of this.
Going over luminosities of nearby stars of actual planets out there that are similar
to our Minecraft planet, blah blah, droppin’ the learning, and then it hit me: I’m going
to spend like 80 hours making this damned thing and then 100 smartasses are gonna be
like “But Auuuuuuuuuustin, what makes you think Minecraft’s world is a globe?
When you get to the end, it just stops, it doesn’t loop around to the other side, blah
blah blah.”
And at first I was like “FUCK THOSE PEOPLE.”
And then I was like “Wait a minute.
Waaaaaaaaait a god damned tootin’ fruitin’ minute!
Those people!
Those hypothetical smartasses I just imagined!
They...they may be right.
No, they ARE right!
I know it for a fact!
I only presumed that Minecraft’s planet is a globe because I’ve been conditioned
by the cabal of ‘Scientists’ who have indoctrinated our world’s youth to hide
the truth about our world: the truth that our world isn’t actually round.
Our world is FUCKING. FLAT.”
Okay maybe I went too far.
I didn’t get quite sucked into the deep well of round-earth deniers, or...flat earth
truthers or...whatever-the-fuck these people call themselves.
But this realization did get me thinking: could a flat minecraft world actually exist?
This isn’t a silly question, honestly.
It would most likely have to be artificial, sure, but...could it even work?
Let’s figure this the fuck out!
The reason this isn’t a super-absurd thing to consider comes from a somewhat unexpected
source: Albert Einstein.
Now, obviously Einstein wasn’t a Flat-Earth conspiracy-theorest, but those of you who
watched last week’s episode on the Gravity Gun will remember one of his most famous thought
experiments, where he said that there’s absolutely no difference between standing
on a planet that’s pulling you down with a force of gravity G and accelerating through
space at an acceleration of G, roughly 9.8 meters-per-second-squared.
In fact, if you were in a box with no windows, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you
were on planet earth or in space.
This is called the principle of equivalence, and it’s this conceptualization that helped
Einstein work all of his math on the theories of General and Special Relativity, and establish
his groundbreaking and complicated Field Equations.
So, is it possible that every world we create in Minecraft is really just a huge fucking
box, flying through space?
Well, maybe.
Each minecraft world is pretty friggin’ huge, clocking in at just shy of 3.6 BILLION
square kilometers.
This is astronomically huge.
Thankfully, though, Minecraft worlds are also quite thin, a hell of a lot thinner than our
own planet.
Each world caps out at 256 meters thick, so given an average matter-and-density spread
using some graphs and estimates, we can get a decent idea of what a normal Minecraft world
weighs.
183 Zettagrams.
Phew.
This is pretty fucking heavy, but it’s not that absurd.
It’s actually about half the size of one of the largest asteroids in the Asteroid Belt:
Pallas 2, which takes up a whopping 7% of the total mass of the asteroid belt alone.
Damn.
Now, this is large enough to have a detectable gravity already, but since our minecraft world
is spread out pretty thinly, you’re not going to notice much of it, so we can pretty
much ignore it.
Minecraft has slightly weaker gravity than Earth, surprisingly enough.
On our planet, things fall at 9.8 meters-per-second-squared, but in minecraft, they fall at 9.1.
A small difference, but here on SCIENCE we like to leave every base fucking covered.
It’s called WORK ETHIC.
This means that our massive-yet-thin box is going to have to accelerate through space
at the rate 9.1 meters squared.
How would you do that?
ROCKETS, of course.
Rockets produce motion by taking advantage of some basic Newtonian concepts: for each
action there’s an equal-and-opposite reaction.
In the case of rockets, it’s shooting a ton of high-energy exhaust out the ass end
of the rocket nozzle, which pushes the space ship forward.
And our rocket better be a massive one, because it would take over 1.6 TRILLION GIGANEWTONS.
How much force is this?
Well, the largest rocket ever produced was the Saturn V, which was used predominantly
during the 1960s and 70s by NASA.
This thing was a fucking badass and produced over 100 million newtons of thrust because
holy SHIT AMERICA.
It would take over 16 TRILLION of these rockets to accelerate our massive Minecraft world
at 9.1 meters-per-second.
Sound intense?
Well, we’re just getting fucking started.
You see, the unfortunate truth is that, well, rockets don’t weigh nothing.
They have mass, too.
And more mass means more force is necessary to accelerate.
This creates a conundrum that anybody who’s played Kerbal Space Program can attest to:
bigger isn’t always better.
A larger rocket may look more impressive, but at the end of the day, you’re creating
more work for yourself.
I’ll spare you the nitty gritty details about exponential math functions, but suffice
to say that since each rocket added adds more mass that needs moved, and therefore more
fuel requirements, we gotta take that into account.
Going down the line we arrive at a final rocket count of over 22 trillion Saturn V rockets,
bringing our total mass alllllll the way up to 246 Zettagrams, almost twice what we started with.
But that seems reasonable in some sort of fantasy world scenario, right.
It may be implausible, but a flat-earth version of Minecraft could TOTALLY exist if you had
an assload of rockets, an infinite budget, and all the time in the world.
Wait a minute.
Time.
TIME.
TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME.
246 zettagrams of mass, pushed by over 22 trillion Saturn V Rockets.
That’s what it would take to accelerate our Minecraft world 9.1 meters-per-second-per-second,
right?
Yeah.
For one second.
That means all that work is going into nudging our planet ship forward for one whole second,
and then it’s fucking DONE.
1 whole second of feeling gravity, and then you’re just, like, fucking floating there
crying as you creep through space.
In order to have gravity, acceleration must continue consistently.
That’s what separates acceleration, which means to move faster in a direction, from
velocity, which is just a measurement of your speed.
Acceleration is change of speed, or delta-v, and in order to have gravity-like forces,
this motherbeast is going to have to keep going.
And in order to keep moving forward for a whole year, it’d take almost 80 QUINTILLION
rockets weighing over 198 THOUSAND yottagrams, almost twice the weight of Neptune.
For those of you playing along at home, you’ve noticed that I said that the fuel and component
parts to accelerate this world for just one year would weigh as much as Neptune, which
has gravity because mass creates gravity.
WHICH MEANS IF YOU HAVE THE MEANS TO CREATE A FLAT EARTH YOU’D JUST FUCKING MAKE A GODDAMN
PLANET INSTEAD.
FLAT EARTHERS MAKE NO GOD DAMNED SENSE.
On top of it, humans have been on this planet, and therefore conceivably this fictional Minecraft
planet, for around 200,000 years.
In order to keep this fictional gravitational force around, you’d have to have so much
fuel that it’d weigh as much as a GOD DAMNED RED GIANT STAR.
And what’s more terrifying is that after a few years, you’re starting to reach relativistic
speeds, which means the energy required to accelerate you at a constant rate will be
creeping up exponentially as you approach the speed of light.
Since it’s super unlikely that these rockets would be able to dial out an exponential increase
in force, the rate of acceleration would start to slow down.
So every flat planet is doomed to experience less and less g-forces as time continues on,
regardless of however the damned thing is accelerating, as it approaches the speed of light.
Eventually it’d be like gravity didn’t exist at all, particularly by the time evolution
has kicked in long enough to evolve humans.
Sorry Flat Earth Truthers.
It turns out that, unfortunately, you’re completely full of shit.
If you really insist on living in a flat world, though, I do highly recommend Minecraft.
It seems to be doing alright for now.
Just, you know, be sure to start a new game every 100,000 years or so, or your character
will start floating off into space as you approach the speed of light.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
You know.
I wasn’t a wasn't really into Anime in High School.
And, like, ALL of my friends were REALLY into anime, and I wasn’t.
But now I’m an adult and what I do in the comfort and anonymity of my own home is my
own business, so I’ve finally been getting into some of the best crops available.
Like Attack on Titan.
Holy crap that show.
That show is honestly worthy of the hype.
It’s unbelievably intense, and there is a video game of it, and I’ve come SUPER
CLOSE to doing a video on it.
Maybe some day.
Anyway, you can find awesome shows like Attack On Titan on Crunchyroll.
Crunchyroll is an amazing site that brings the best Anime from Japan into your computer.
The cool thing about Crunchyroll is that they work closely with the people who actually
make the shows you love, and give them a fair cut for letting them host the videos.
You can head on over to crunchyroll.com/shoddy to start a 30 day free trial right now.
Even if you don’t wanna watch giant monsters eating humans, Crunchyroll recently partnered
with Funimation, bringing shows like Cowboy Beebop and other cool shows they’ve never
had before.
If you use the link and become a member, you get these shows in full 1080p HD without ads.
That’s crunchyroll.com/shoddycast, which tells ‘em you came from us.
Do it.
Nobody has to know.
It’ll be our little secret.
ALSO, today I’m gonna be streaming Minecraft on Hardcore mode, which means PERMADEATH baby.
I’ll be trying to survive in a harsh, flat-worlded setting.
Head on over to twitch.tv/shoddycast RIGHT NOW and watch me die to a creeper JUST AS
I FINISH MY HOUSE. GOD DAMN ASSHOLES.