Outside of Minecraft, dirt is usually called "soil" and is formed from a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and zillions of teeny-tiny, live plants and animals. It's a slow process - generating three centimetres of soil takes about 1,000 years.
Minecraft only has one kind of dirt (two if you count coarse dirt), but real-world soil varies enormously around the world. Different soils can have different texture, structure, density, porosity, consistency, temperature, colour and even electrical conductivity, depending on what it formed from.
Soil is more important than you probably realise. An ancient Chinese philosopher once wrote that humankind's continued existence is "completely dependent upon six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains". Without soil and rain, we'd have no food, and with no food there'd be no humans. We also get many medicines from soil, it can be a building material (it's a great natural insulator), and in some places it's even used as a fuel.
But there's a problem - we're actually running out of soil, and surprisingly quickly. Intensive, mechanised farming around the world loosens soil, and so more and more of it is being washed down rivers and into the sea. At current rates of soil loss - about 30 soccer pitches every minute - we only have about 60 years of farming left.
Getting everyone to switch to organic farming is the most obvious solution to this, but it might be a good idea to keep your chests filled with stacks of dirt, just in case.
Partagez cette histoire