Teenager Maps The Universe in Minecraft

 

 

Teenager Maps Universe in Minecraft! Yes thats right!  YouTuber, Christopher Slayton 18, recently created entire heavenly bodies such as planets, black holes, galaxies  using nothing but the blocks within Minecraft.

Minecraft seems it knows no boundaries from talented fans who are pushing their creative talents as fast as the Universe is expanding! It has evolved into a creative powerhouse, with members in the millions working within the community building wondersous things, ranging from the Starship Enterprise to vast creations of world maps and cities.

Recently, Christopher Slayton — who goes by the handle ChrisDaCow on YouTube — decided to take the Minecrafts creative potential to its grandest scale yet, by attempting to recreate the entire cosmos.

The Teenagers Maps of the Universe begun by carefully recreating planet Earth. This ended up being a humble beginning compared to what followed, however it still took the You Tuber a total of three solid days of work to measure out the continents and get the surface colors, clouds, and lighting corect. Illuminating the globe proved to be a challenging task, however, by using a tool that lets you ‘paint with light’ to it’s maximum capacity,  Slayton was able to give his creation immersive lighting gradients and effects.

 

 

 

AN IMAGE OF SLAYTON’S MINECRAFT UNIVERSE. (IMAGE CREDIT: CHRISTOPHER SLAYTON)

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Teenager Maps Universe in Minecraft

With Earth complete, Slayton went on to create the remaining planets in the solar system. Attention to detail here was no exception  as some of these planets orbit with a noticeable tilt, which was recreated in the newly created digital universe by painting the planets at an angle. This added extra complexity that was compounded more by the fact that three of the planets — Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — host their own distinctive ring systems.

Finally, the teenager was able to block-build the Sun — complete with an apocalyptic number of solar flares — with the help of some of the brightest blocks in Minecraft.

From here the scale of the cosmos that Christopher planned to build got evern more ambitious, as the artist took aim at recreating one of the most iconic cosmic structures discovered to date: the Pillars of Creation.

This expansive collection of interstellar dust and gas is in actually a stellar nursery that forms part of the Eagle Nebula. With a width of around 4.5 light-years, the pillars of creation were radically larger than anything he had designed on prior works. For practical reasons, the teenager decided to keep the size of his Minecraft representations comparable to his model of the solar system.

In a video posted to his YouTube channel, Slayton explained, “Every time I made a build, the actual scale was going to stay almost exactly the same, while the size of the object in the universe was going to get exponentially larger in light-years”.

There would be a few moments of Mathes ahead!

Impressively, while creating the Pillars, he took into account their real-world positions relative to one another, and modeled the major stars throughout images of the nebula that have been captured by Hubble and other telescopes.

 

 

 

As the Teenager maps the Universe in Minecraft he was faced with his greatest challenge! a Black hole. He sought to recreate one of the most evocative and awe-inspiring celestial objects in the universe.

Blackholes are fairly common in one form or another throughout our universe, and supermassive ones are thought to lurk at the heart of almost every large galaxy such as our Galaxy the Milkyway.

Christopher based his work on the black hole ‘Gargantua’, from the 2014 Sci-Fi movie Interstellar. Although a  fictional Blackhole, this singularity — and its light-bending properties was an excellent representation of how an actual black hole would appear if observed from orbit.

Figuring out the curves of a black hole is a challenging endeavor, this was made even more difficult trying to recreate this in Minecraft as he only had blocks to work with. However, Slayton worked out he could use hundreds of lines of blocks as guides to create the singularity’s light curves, and then light them in such a way as to appear as an impressive Minecraftification of Gargantua by using the painting with light program he used when creating the Solar System.

Teenager Maps Universe in Minecraft

The Next Challenge was to create Milky Way-like spiral galaxies and, finally, got to work on the entire universe. Based on computer simulations and theories of many astronomers who now believe that the universe, if viewed from a great distance, would appear as a cosmic web with filaments made up of glowing galaxies and clouds of gas that are seperated by voids of nothingness.

In total, it took the You tuber over a month to create his digital universe, which has to be one of the most impressive and massive Minecraft builds to date. Time very well spent and recognition is deserved for a creative young man.