Is The Minecraft World Bigger Than Earth?

If you're familiar at all with Minecraft, you know the game is huge. Players test the limits of its capabilities every day, and with more and more jumping in, there are no signs that's going to end. But we've always wondered: just how big is Minecraft, actually? Is the Minecraft world bigger than Earth?

There's a very good chance you're going to be amazed by the answer.

To start, let's get some basic numbers out of the way. The Earth's diameter is 12,742 kilometers, which is the distance you'd travel if you bored a hole in the ground from one side of the planet to the other. The Minecraft world is flat, but if you traveled from one edge of the map to the other, you'd cover 64,000 kilometers. Obviously, you can see that one of those numbers is bigger than the other, and that the advantage goes to Minecraft in this instance. But you can't truly wrap your head around how the two compare until you see it in photo form.

Feast your eyes on the image found in this Game Informer article and you'll get a sense of just how massive Minecraft's world is. Not only is it wider than the diameter of many Earth-sized planets put together, it's actually wider than Neptune, as well. And Neptune is no small planet.

Minecraft beats Earth in terms of surface area, too. According to Universe Today, the Earth's surface is measured at 510 million square kilometers. The surface area of the Minecraft world? 4,096,000,000; over 4 billion square kilometers. That's more than the surface area of eight Earths combined. And that's a lot of space to build.

So is the Minecraft world bigger than Earth? Yes, and "bigger" isn't doing it justice. It's way bigger. It makes Earth look measly. The Minecraft world is a massive achievement; now what we really want to know is, how does it compare to the galaxy in No Man's Sky?