I recently read this blog discussing how old Steve is. I was fascinated, and being a bit of a mathematician myself (I say "a bit" because I doubt whether or not I have enough knowledge to justify the title), I thought it would be fun to write a blog involving math. In the comments of mddty01's blog, Kidd Shadow asked "How big would a grave yard for all the dead Steves be?" In this blog, I intend to answer that question.

The hard part to calculating this, is that no one really know how many times they have died. While there is a death count in the statistics, mine has reset several times, and it wasn't implemented when Mine Craft came out.
Another thing to consider, is the fact that a lot of people change their skin.
Something else to take into consideration, is the different play styles. I mostly play Creative, and rarely join any other server but mine. So deaths are uncommon for me, however, there are other players who play on servers a lot, with deaths being a normal occurrence.
Then, there is the matter of Mine Craft expanding to other platforms. Since I have yet to discover how many copies of Mine Craft have been sold on these other platforms, I will stick with the PC/Mac editions of the game.
Finally, there is the issue that every hour, dozens if not hundreds of people buy Mine Craft, when you read this, the total number of sold copies of Mine Craft will be different. There is no easy way to compensate for this.
If I get enough of a response, then I may try to take some of these issues into account and work on creating a function that will estimate the size of the graveyard needed to bury the Steves as time goes on. But until then, you will have to live with this.

With these things in mind, I will now estimate the size of the graveyard needed to bury all of the Steves.
I have had MC for over 2 years, in that time, I have died about 800 times (the number is probably way off, but there's not much I can do about it), out of those 800, about 280 of those deaths were after I changed my skin, so that leaves approximately 520 times that I died as Steve. According to www.minecraft.net over 12,380,500 people have purchased the PC/Mac editions of the game. Multiplying 520 deaths by 12,380,500 players, gives 6,437,427,880 deaths.

Now, before I continue, I want to say something important. This number is assuming that I actually died 520 times as Steve, and that 12,380,500 other people have too. I KNOW that this is way off, but right now, I have no idea what the percentage of the various play styles are. Something YOU can do to help, is to leave a comment on this blog telling me what your play style is, that way I can get an idea of what the percentages are. Now back to the math.

Steve is 2x1x1 meters, and the usual depth for burring someone is around 2m, to to bury 1 Steve, we would need a hole 2m long, by 1m wide, by 2m deep, or 4 cubic meters. 4 cubic meters multiplied by 6,437,427,880 deaths, gives 25,749,711,520 cubic meters. If you wanted a mass burial, where we throw all of the Steves in a hole then cover them with a 1m deep covering, then we would only need a hole 52m long, by 40m wide, by 12379670m deep (12379670 is prime). To put that in a slightly easier to understand (but less accurate) form, we would need a hole 2953m long, by 2953m wide, by 2954m deep.

But lets say that we are nice, and we want to give Steve a decent burial. We want there to be some distance between the Steves, lets say 1m, we also don't want the Steves to be buried on top on each other. So to bury 1 Steve, we would now need 4m x 3m x 2m space. But if Steve #1 is 1m from Steve #2, then we don't need 4m x 3m x 2m to bury Steve #2, because he is already 1m away from Steve #1. So we really only need 3m x 2m x 2m, or 12 cubic meters of space to bury 1 Steve. So to bury all of the Steves, we would need a graveyard 3120(+1)m wide, by 12379669(+1)m long, by 2m deep. Or approximately 62149m long x 62149m wide x 2m deep.
The reason I added +1 to the width and length, is so that the Steves on the edge also have a 1m distance between them and the edge of the Graveyard.

Wow, that was a lot of math. I am impressed that you made it this far, hopefully I did everything correctly, but if you find something that doesn't quite add up, leave me a comment telling what it is and I will fix it and/or explain why I did it. Thanks for sticking with to the end. I hope you enjoyed it.

-Jmlee49

What's that? Still want more? Before I uploaded this blog (but after I typed it) Xeroph19 posted a blog answering the same question. Why not head over there to read that one too? Link