As we all know, 2023 marks the beginning of a new era of "archaeology", giving a whole new meaning to the world of Minecraft from an archaeological perspective. However, many people may not understand what is the significance of archaeology to a world and a civilization.
01
Let's start with the Mayan civilization!
The Maya Civilization is an ancient and mysterious ancient civilization. It is a rare jungle civilization in human history, just like the jungle villagers who disappeared in Minecraft, the Mayan civilization has not been inherited and continued in this world.
In this era, the general understanding of the ancient Mayan civilization was on December 21, 2012. Because on this day, people all over the world were waiting for the arrival of the "end of the world" recorded by this civilization.
If the end of the world really comes, then the Mayan civilization will be canonized!
Why didn't the end of the world come, so where did the talk of the end of the world come from?
Of course, the result is that nothing happened on this day, otherwise how would you and I exist to this day?
In fact, after archaeologists' research on this ancient civilization, it was found that the "end of the world" predicted by the Mayan civilization was actually a calculation process of the Mayan era of time. The Mayans believed that time did not pass forward all the time, but rather a cyclical mechanism, where time did not disappear, but would be restarted at a certain point in time. And December 21, 2021 happens to be the end and starting point of the Maya's cycle of time restart. It belongs to a time of apocalypse, but also to a new beginning.
(Of course, there is also the interesting idea that the original world was destroyed on December 21, 2012, and that this world is now just another parallel universe.) ）
02
The Mayans were ahead of their time in understanding this concept.
Let's not say whether time is cyclical,
So is there an end to it?
We don't know the real world, but we can explore the concept in Minecraft.
In the Minecraft world, the maximum time set that can be changed with commands is 2147483647, based on the fact that the time lapse in Minecraft is 72 times that of the real world, which is equivalent to 1242 days in the real world. However, this is not an extreme value that can be achieved in Minecraft world time.
If you keep the Minecraft world open and keep it running permanently, the maximum time value can reach 9223372036854775807, which is equivalent to 384307168202282 days. It would take 2.1 billion years for the real world to run to the end of time in Minecraft.
What is the concept of 2.1 billion years? The earth is only 4.6 billion years old, and 2.1 billion years ago, life on the earth was only in the form of prokaryotes, something more primitive than cells.
So what happens after the end of time?
In fact, there are only two endings, one is a crash and the other is a restart.
The Maya understood the concept of the passage of time as a kind of cycle, and from an archaeological point of view, the wisdom and science of this ancient civilization may have reached a point of considerable development and prosperity.
History is always an astonishing coincidence, and the vanishing jungle civilizations, whether Mayan or Minecraft's jungle civilizations, are left with a huge "pyramid"/jungle temple.
Archaeologists have excavated a large number of clay pots in the ruins of the ancient Mayan civilization, and the murals engraved on them tell us that the ancient civilization of human beings wore leopard-print tide clothes, drank cocoa-ground coffee, and even smoked dry cigarettes.
The archaeological update of Minecraft and the unearthed clay pots also tell us that ancient civilizations gave birth to weapons such as bows and arrows and swords, cultivated wheat, domesticated wolves, learned to mine, occasionally went fishing, and even creepers are ancient species handed down from that era.
Archaeology is a miscellaneous science, and archaeologists are a miscellaneous person who is well versed in ancient and modern times. Ordinary people realized through pottery shards: Oh, it turns out that the ancient civilization of human beings learned to mine. Through magnificent architecture, complex calendars, exquisite writing, and mysterious beliefs, the real archaeological experts have deciphered the code of civilization and understood the ancients' definition of the passage of time and the end of the world.
So, if you use the eyes of a professional archaeologist to look at what is left behind after the archaeological update of the Minecraft world, how many secrets of ancient civilizations can be revealed?