Minecraft's Impossible World EXPLAINED! | The SCIENCE of... Minecraft

dear mojang hi it's me austin old school intro minecraft video on an old school topic with gravitational constants simple formulas and a little bit of me going insane oh boy just what the doctor ordered hi hello today we're answering a question that nobody asked which is is the world of minecraft even possible now we've flirted with various aspects of this question in some way or another over the years while talking about the day night cycle whether or not it's a flat planet and something else i'm sure as well we talk about the minecraft world a whole heck of a lot here and we're gonna talk about it again today this time we're gonna look at it holistically to determine the answer to this question could a planet with the qualities of the minecraft world even possibly exist okay so i think it's really important that we talk about what the precise question is that we're trying to answer here because it sounds kind of vague at a glance and maybe even kind of easy to answer but it's a little bit trickier than you might imagine a given minecraft world is a specific size i mean for gameplay purposes it's effectively infinite but it technically isn't and we will get to that part for another the second cliffs and caves update changed a lot about how the minecraft world works we will get to that part as well actually it's because of the cliffs and caves update that i now feel like i have to put a version number in all of my videos now because this update rendered at least a few of my old videos completely out of date maybe i should remake them now it'd be pretty easy just find an old spreadsheet update the numbers and hey austin stay on target tanya could you please put a little uh 1.19 somewhere okay so basically what we want to know is given the size of the minecraft world and its mass and material makeup could a planet identical to minecraft exist in real life so first of all let's lead with our assumptions the first and most important assumption is that the minecraft world is a sphere or a ball if we're being totally topologically specific not that any of you are topologists are you throw this video a like if you're a topologist it'll make me feel good and maybe it can distract you from the absolutely bonkers field of mathematics you've chosen to specialize in where was i oh right it balls made me laugh i i put laughs in the script and it actually made me giggle i am an actual child anyway we're assuming that the minecraft world is a planet planet if that bothers you i don't know watch the like three videos we've done on it or something assumption two is not technically an assumption but i feel like i have to bring it up every time i do a video talking about the size of the minecraft world and that's that the world in each minecraft game has a limited size this can be a bit confusing because the purlin noise generation functions do technically still run for quite a ways out from the world boundary but you can't actually interact with any of the blocks beyond a certain point past the boundary and getting past it requires glitches and bugs so effectively this world barrier is the size limit of the minecraft world you've probably never reached it legitimately because it is really really far from the in-game spawn point like no joke if you had everything working for you and you used speed 2 splash potions on the game's fastest horse to boost its speed up to 19.922 blocks per second and nothing was in your way and you galloped straight there at the eight times distance multiplier you would get if you were galloping in the nether it would still take you 188.2 000 seconds to reach the over world game boundary of 29.9 million blocks that's over two straight days of running in one direction and playing precisely no other parts of the game there's probably a faster way to do it with ender pearls or something but that should just give you a sense of just how big the minecraft over world actually is this world boundary is 29999 984 blocks away from the center of the map in each of the cardinal directions meaning looking from the top down the world of minecraft has a surface area just shy of 3.6 quadrillion square meters this is humongous and while i don't like to make bold claims i feel pretty confident that no single human being is capable of exploring every single square meter of an entire minecraft world it is just too big that said while this is pretty huge it's not impossibly big knowing how big the map is however is only the first step in determining whether or not the world of minecraft adequately follows the laws of physics to the degree that we could label the planet plausible the next thing i wanted to do was to determine the mass of the minecraft planet you see there are possible issues that could arise from the planet being too small and having too high of a mass there is a limit to how dense a planet can actually be due to density pressure factors and all that stuff now originally i was going to try to use the cliffs and caves updates increased depths and heights to estimate the mass of the minecraft world using these dimensions but i realized that this actually doesn't matter for our purposes one of the issues is that yeah while the game doesn't load anything beyond bedrock it's called bedrock this implies that there's some stuff underneath it you just personally lack the ability to dig past it for whatever reason just because we can't see anything past bedrock legitimately doesn't mean there's not more stuff down there technically so yeah using a playable region of minecraft for mass determining purposes is a mistake but not all is lost because as i said there is a better way to do this and it all starts with a little thing that i like to call gravity believe it or not if we can figure out the gravity of the minecraft world we can easily figure out if the minecraft world is a plausible place or not we've calculated the gravity of minecraft several times through the history of these videos using a lot of methods the basic one is to just measure how long it takes for you to fall a certain distance and use this formula to determine the average acceleration you experience in our last video using 100 blocks we determined gravity and minecraft to be approximately 27 meters per second per second but instead let's try another way you see certain blocks follow the laws of gravity too like sand gravel activated tnt let's uh instead this time use sand dropping it from 50 blocks up and timing how long it takes to land i'm getting uh what the heck 15 meters per second per second are you kidding me no that can't be right all right all right all right all right now let's try 100 blocks this time like we did in the last video 14 what the heck is going on well okay there's a few things going on here our calculations in the past have been a little uh fast and loose if i'm being honest with you because minecraft like most video games and you know reality has something called terminal velocity which is what occurs when you're falling through an atmosphere as you fall the air exerts a force on your body as you push it out of the way with um you know you as you fall faster this force increases until it matches the force of gravity and you stop speeding up entirely 100 blocks in minecraft is probably well after the point where you experience terminal velocity which is why we're getting 15 meters per second per second with gravel and sand at 50 blocks but 14 at 100 so our numbers in the past have been a little off but likely not in a way that's big enough to make much of a difference in the outcomes of those videos if nothing else the gravity should be higher than what we've been calculating making any horrible outcomes that much more dramatic the real mystery is why are blocks that are impacted by gravity falling slower than i am as a player well it turns out that blocks that are impacted by gravity have a much lower amount of gravitational pull applied to them i i don't know why maybe they're hollow or something anyway it doesn't matter we're gonna keep using players because that's how we do it around here measuring more closely looking for the point where i stopped speeding up i measured a force of gravity to be about 30 meters per second squared then i decided to just stop goofing off and i looked it up and apparently the official value is 32 meters per second per second for entities like the player and mobs that's pretty high that's over 3.5 times the gravity of earth and that's actually higher than the surface gravity of jupiter which is 24ish meters per second squared okay so why do we need to know the gravity of the minecraft world anyway well it's easy because we can use this formula here to reverse engineer the mass of the planet if we know the gravity well okay not quite see our gravity 32 meters per second squared goes here the little g the big g is the gravitational constant explaining what that is is very simple it's the empirical physical constant that articulates the proportionality connecting the gravitational force between two bodies with the product of their masses and the inverse square of their distance okay yeah i did just read that off the wikipedia article directly in dumb austin words it's a number with which we use to describe how gravity works and it shows up in a bunch of gravity-related equations including this one it is a pretty tiny number 6.67 times 10 to the negative 11. it's a really tiny number excel thinks it's a zero anyway we want that one and we can use basic algebra to turn the formula around to solve for m the mass of any given orbital body technically we need to put our mass in there too but it's so insignificant as to be totally pointless to include so this is our new formula and there is a missing piece it's this little um this uh hook shaped letter little little shepherd's crook you know th this this letter right here i wanna i wanna it's a it's a it's a hook let it's a hook letter oh oh no it's it's it's an r apparently well okay yeah that makes sense because it's kind of like a pirate's hook anyway this r stands for radius which is the other piece of the puzzle we need to determine what a minecraft planet looks like so yeah let's do it we actually have all the information we need already believe it or not it's actually five paragraphs back in the script the surface area of the minecraft world bam chekhov's gun baby except instead of a gun it's numbers with the 3.6 quadrillion square meter figure we got earlier we can use this sexy formula for the surface area of a sphere to determine the radius of our planet and rearranging it in this way and plugging in the area right here we get a radius of 16.9 million meters that is a lot of meters the distance from the surface of the earth to our core for example is only 6.3 million meters it's not unbelievably huge however this puts our minecraft planet at approximately 68 percent the radius of neptune meaning that it's slightly smaller than that far away planet this leads to some concerns however we have a planet with a surface gravity higher than jupiter's but like uh jupiter is 70 times larger than it is this means that our planet is impossible right well let's just hold on to our horses everybody because we're skipping ahead remember why we figured out how large the planet is to begin with we want to know the mass without knowing the mass of a minecraft world we can't possibly know how plausible it is on an astrological scale so astronomical scale is it feasible if you're a capricorn red moon rising dig i don't know i'm i was born in december 27th 1987 around midnight you can do my chart for me all right how plausible is it on an astronomical scale so taking our radius and plopping it in our formula we can hit enter and finally figure out how massive our planet is 137 septillion kilograms this is about 34 more massive than neptune our closest comparison planet then we want to figure out the average density in a how do we do that well it's easy we divide the mass we just got by the volume of the minecraft planet which we get using the volume of a sphere formula right here four thirds times pi times r cubed to get us this humongous number dividing them we get 6762 kilograms per cubic meter of average planet density that is uh that's plausible that's a 100 plausible it's actually denser than any of the other planets in our solar system but not by a lot realistically what it means is that there's a lot more heavy metals in the crust and core of minecraft than we have anywhere else in our solar system which you know kind of checks out i mean there's tons of rare metals scattered all over the place in minecraft though this is way way less dense than some of the densest materials known to man it's about as dense as the metal antimony something i did not know existed until just today and it's way less dense than say osmium with its 22.5 000 kilograms per cubic meter and heck for bonus points let's see if this makes sense for how we experience minecraft and spoiler it totally does this explains why you can only dig down so far before you hit rock that's so dense that you can't get past it since gravity is gonna be pulling the crystals together so tight that you're gonna need something really strong to get through that layer of bedrock it also explains why the mountains of minecraft are so small i finally found one that's almost at the max height for mountains and it's like basically just a big freaking hill it's really not even a mountain mountains cannot get much bigger because gravity is gonna be pulling them down really really hard it's difficult to be a one kilometer tall mountain when you're straining against gravity so freaking high that it makes jupiter cry so um yeah i think we can say without qualifiers that the world of minecraft is actually totally plausible and internally consistent that's kind of a it's kind of amazing i mean you wouldn't want to go there as a human being you'd almost certainly die under the force of gravity and um how on earth are these islands floating i mean i love them but but how how are they doing it it doesn't make any sense [Music] sincerely austin i have to give out a huge huge shout out to my patrons who make this entire show the entire show possible i'm talking about all of you but especially those of you who paid me to say your names like juan santamaria mad lad 616 miss kendra alan hagers edit mdp nicholas palinger marissa resnick nick patterson and loretta mazur what a great thing heck yeah i had fun do you have fun i'm gonna go take a nap i'm tired [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,431,083

Keywords: minecraft, minecraft theory, minecraft update, minecraft tips, minecraft 1.19, minecraft 1.19 update, minecraft overworld, minecraft challenge, minecraft mods, the science of minecraft, the science, the science of, game theory, game theorists, matpat, game theory minecraft, minecraft mod, minecraft cliffs and caves, cliffs and caves update, minecraft 1.20, minecraft 1.19.1, minecraft 100 days, minecraft nether, minecraft animation, minecraft music

Id: wv7hFF14OEM

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022

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