[masraum]

Related, and very cool what this kid did.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-18-year-old-recreated-the-entire-universe-in-minecraft-180980940/








Below is not the entire text of the article, just excerpts.

This 18-Year-Old Recreated the ‘Entire Universe’ in Minecraft

From the video game’s blocks, he built galaxies, a nebula, a black hole and the solar system

Though the expansiveness of the universe may be daunting to some, 18-year-old Christopher Slayton decided to embrace the vastness rather than be intimidated by it. For nearly two months, he analyzed structures in outer space and recreated the cosmos from the virtual cubes that make up the video game world of Minecraft.

Slayton, who graduated high school in the spring, researched black holes, assessed the various hues of Saturn’s rings and looked at images of Earth to build the universe—block by block—on his computer, reports April Rubin for the New York Times.

The teenager documented the project on his YouTube channel, where he goes by the username Chris DaCow, and shared the building process on a viral Reddit thread.

After all the effort to re-create the universe, “I realized even more how beautiful it is,” Slayton tells the Times.

or the sun, Slayton used the “brightest blocks in Minecraft” and even included solar flares to make the star “feel alive with fire,” he says in the video. As he moved on to creating a cluster of galaxies, he hiked to the top of a mountain with a friend and set up a telescope in an attempt to observe the real-world collections of stars, gas, dust and planets that he sought to replicate.

“We were surrounded by the cosmos, millions of stars right before our eyes,” Slayton says in the video.