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[MUSIC]
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Consider a cubic cow, living on a cubic hillside, under cubic clouds, on a cube
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world. Could planet Minecraft actually exist?
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[MUSIC]
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With over 70 million copies sold and more than 100,000,000 players, the world of Minecraft
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is huge. But it’s not infinite.
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Thanks to some quirks of your computer’s mathematical code, the Minecraft Overworld
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is limited to a width of 68.7 billion meters, for a total area of 4.7 quadrillion
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square kilometers or about 9 million times the surface area
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of Earth.
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Of course, that’s just one face. All six sides would have an area of over 28 quadrillion
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square kilometers, more than 4,000 times the surface area of the sun.
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Near the World Border, about 30,000,000 meters from the center of any Minecraft landscape,
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things start to get very weird. Living stuff just sort of disappears.
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On a cubic planet, this makes sense. Gravity would only be oriented straight up and down
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at the center of each face. The closer we get to any horizon, the more of the planet’s
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mass that would be under and behind us, and although that would make gravity slightly
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weaker towards the edge, we’d get the odd sensation that we were walking uphill.
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That angled gravity would end up drawing air and water away from the edges. Viewing our
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cubic planet from orbit, we’d see six bubble atmospheres, one in the center of each face.
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On the surface, we’d only be able to travel so far before we simply walked right out into
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space.
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[MUSIC]
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Ah, there’s nothing quite as beautiful as a cubic sunset. Unlike on Earth, the Overworld’s
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sun and moon are always oriented directly opposite of each other. One explanation is
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that the Overmoon is actually a neighboring cubic planet, locked in its own synchronous
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orbit with the Cubesun but that doesn’t explain the stars.
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In Earth’s night sky, the relative positions of the stars and moon change each night as
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we travel around the sun. But in Minecraft, the night sky always looks the same. This
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can only mean the Overworld is at the center of its universe, orbited by a fixed sun, moon,
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and stars. Clearly, Copernicus would not be a ‘crafter.
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Since the sun and moon pass directly overhead each day, we can conclude that the polar axis
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of our cubic planet passes directly through the center of two of the six faces. These
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polar faces would only ever see dim twilight, and their bubble biomes are most likely frozen
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wastelands, devoid of complex life. But the other illuminated faces of our world could
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be home to three unique Overworlds of their own.
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In 1884 a Swiss astronomer claimed to have discovered a cube world just like this, orbiting
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beyond Neptune. Spoiler: he was wrong. Very, very wrong.
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With my sincerest apologies to Superman, Bizarro and Minecraft players everywhere, the laws
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of physics say cubic planets and cubic ducks are sadly impossible.
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Having enough gravity to rearrange into a sphere is one of the criteria for being a
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planet. Gravity wants to pull an object’s mass into the smallest volume possible, and
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to distribute that gravity as evenly as possible among that mass. The best shape for that? A
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sphere.
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If a gas planet like Jupiter, made mostly of hydrogen, were just 80 times more massive
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than it is, it wouldn’t be a planet anymore. Its gravity and internal pressure would be
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so high that elements like hydrogen would begin to fuse to helium at its core it
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would turn into a star.
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For a rocky planet to turn into a star, to fuse heavier elements like silicon, it would
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have to be about 8 to 11 times more massive than our sun.
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Our cube world’s volume would be 3.2 x 10^23 cubic kilometers, and at a density similar
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to Earth’s, its hexahedral mass would be nearly 900,000 times that of our sun. The
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only things that massive in our universe are - supermassive - black holes.
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These large black holes are likely found at the center of most galaxies, surrounded by
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incredible amounts of heat and radiation. Like all black holes, they contain so much
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mass, so much gravity, that even light can’t escape.
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So, a cubic Overworld might be impossible
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in this universe, but if Minecraft has taught us anything, it’s a universe of its own.
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And there, who knows what might be possible? Stay curious.
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This episode was sponsoredby dropbox
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No matter what your create, whether you write it, draw it, mix it, or test it,
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Dropbox makes it simple to work the way you want.
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That’s why over 400 million people around the world use Dropbox to work together
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on any file, with anyone, from anywhere. Dropbox. All Yours.