Nobody joined, nobody typed a command, nobody placed a single block – and after ≈1,975,000,000 [1.975 billion] simulated years, the Ender Dragon died anyway. RedLogic ran an idle Minecraft world as a Monte Carlo simulation: Endermen haul pumpkins out of pillager outposts, the pumpkins accidentally turn into snow golems, the golems provoke creepers, the creepers blast a tunnel down to a naturally completed end portal. Opening that route alone took ≈37,500 years; the first end crystal fell after ≈3 million, to a snowball that missed its Enderman. Villagers went extinct somewhere along the way. That’s ≈30 times longer than the dinosaurs have been gone – for one dragon. Running Minecraft Until It Beats Itself is the most gloriously pointless thing on YouTube. GG, nobody.
Kardashev ranks civilizations by how much energy they burn; John D. Barrow flipped it in 1998 and ranked them by how small the things are they can bend – genes, molecules, atoms, nuclei, particles, spacetime itself. On Kardashev we’re still stuck at ≈0.7, not even Type I; on Barrow we’re already spelling logos with single atoms. The catch: poking at the Planck scale would take a collider circling the sun, a little past Neptune, so going deep means going wide first. Linear brains, nonlinear cosmos: 103 paper folds span the observable universe and squeeze the sheet’s width down to a Planck length. Maybe the aliens aren’t missing, though; maybe they just stayed home and went small 🔬
