This first bit is for steuard. Apparently there's a group of Tolkein fans recreating Middle Earth in Minecraft. There's some images in the article, plus more on the homepage of the project, plus a trailer for the project on YouTube.

I'm not sure if that's more or less cool than the people who've recreated the Earth. I'm not sure which qualifies as more epic. The Middle Earth project involves a large group of people apparently designing everything by hand. (I have no idea if they're actually _building_ it by hand or building external models and importing then.) The Earth project on the other hand was created mostly using NASA satellite imagery, which means it involved less manual labor but more tech-geekery.

Also i found a couple cool timelapse videos of Minecraft construction projects. An Asian temple, a "Valley of Heroes", and a Romanesque "City of Arches". It looks like there are a lot of other timelapse videos around, those are just the first three that i found.