This Apocalyptic Fan Theory Changes How You Play Minecraft

"Minecraft" certainly has a dark side to it that may not be immediately evident. The franchise is full of eerie characters and realms, including the zombie-like creepers, the hellish dimension known as the Nether, and the deadly Ender Dragon that threatens weary travelers with a fiery doom. However, the overarching mythology has often been a bit difficult to parse. Over the years, this aspect of the game has allowed gamers to build a world to their own specifications, but it has also opened things up to interpretation. This is where "Minecraft" fan theories come in.

A large subsection of the "Minecraft" fanbase has spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how various elements of the franchise tie together. While most "Minecraft" players are happy to accept the weird world at face value, others are certain there's more to it than meets the eye. One popular fan theory, posited by YouTuber Spumwack, suggests that the entire world in which "Minecraft" takes place was born from an apocalyptic event.

This theory first began to take shape when Spumwack realized that the sun and moon in "Minecraft" were always directly opposite one another in the sky. After considering a number of possibilities, including categorizing the Moon as its own separate planet, Spumwack concluded that the sun and the moon are orbiting the world of "Minecraft." This would explain how it would appear that the stars in the night sky are also orbiting the earth at the same rate of speed as the moon and sun, which is a stark departure from how our own solar system works. According to Spumwack, this configuration really only makes sense if the planet in the center of everything used to be a sun itself.

Spunwack's theory posits that the story of "Minecraft" actually begins billions of years in the future, when the universe is slowly burning out. Suns are dying and stars are losing their shine, which also explains why there are relatively fewer of them in "Minecraft." 

Spumwack theorizes that an advanced civilization figured out how to get their remaining people off of their dying homeworld and onto the nearby burned-out sun, then detonated their homeworld to create a new sun. After another period of billions of years, this last-ditch effort paid off. The escaping people were able to seed a new world with plant and animal life, starting from scratch on a planetoid orbited by their former homeworld, which has become their blazing new sun. In other words, every time you look up at the bright shining orb in the sky, your character is actually looking at what used to be the home of its ancestors.

If you believe this theory, it's hard not to think about it every time you fire up "Minecraft." The game's survival aspects become even more poignant when couched in the idea that the very ground you tread on was created during a very different fight for survival. It's a fascinating theory, onethat  instills every "Minecraft" session with an element of existential dread. After all, even as this new world begins to flourish, the rest of the universe is still dying and contracting outside. It makes one wonder how much time the "Minecraft" world could possibly have left.

Spumwack mentions in the description of his video that this concept isn't totally infallible, and fans are bound to have questions about his conclusions. The YouTuber has answered a few of these questions in the description box, noting that the timeline of the escape from the dead planet is still unclear. For instance, the process of terraforming the dead star for human life might have taken millions of years on its own.

Despite the thought and care that went into crafting this theory, not to mention the impressive knowledge of astronomy on display, Spumwack writes, "Like any theory, this one has holes." Sure enough, a number of fans have taken to pointing out the flaws in this theory. For one thing, the extreme level of gravity on a star such as this would theoretically make it next to impossible for any living being to sustain itself. Forget about being able to move around or build new structures; you'd be lucky to be able to even stand (or survive having all your organs turned to mush by the sheer force of gravity). 

One Redditor points out that the "Minecraft" world obeys completely different logic than our own: "There are so many things about the universe that are necessarily different than our own that you can't use real-world science to justify anything without raising a thousand other problems." In other words, it's kind of a fool's errand to expect most "Minecraft" fan theories to stand up to scientific scrutiny. After all, this is a universe where everything is a cube made up of a zillion other cubes. Like many fan theories, this one has captured fans' imaginations, but it's probably best not to apply too much real-world logic to it.