Noah's Ark could float! (theoretically)

[HansMustermann]

Considering that the critical point is 374 Celsius and well over 200 atmospheres pressure, I'd say you're pretty safe. I don't think many pressure cookers can do that

 

[BowlOfRed]

I suppose that means I should avoid setting my pressure cooker to supercritical, unless I want to make soup.

Man, I don't have one of those....

"You're cooking here, maybe canning, all the way, all the way up. You're at critical. Where can you go from there? Where?
I don't know.
Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Set it to supercritical?
Supercritical. Exactly. More critical."

 

[tyr_13]

I didn't know that.

I suppose that means I should avoid setting my pressure cooker to supercritical, unless I want to make soup.

As long as it doesn't go Prompt-Critical, you should be fine.

 

[I Ratant]

Until it was torn apart by said high seas.

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Pendant!

 

[I Ratant]

...

I disagree. Perhaps it's time to call the MythBusters in on this one.

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Gettaholt of the one built for the movie.
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I expect the 'busters couldn't find a pole long enough for them to not touch a religious myth with!

 

[I Ratant]

Actually, let me return to one aspect I haven't explored of the hypothesis that there was that much water floating in the atmosphere.

For a start, when you have 1000 times more water up their than air to hold it up, it can't be clouds, because no amount of convection of the tiny amount of air will hold it up. It's just too heavy. Most of it will therefore have to be vapour. Sorta. I'll get to it.

But the more you increase pressure, the more water likes to stay a liquid, pretty much. About a quarter of the way to what we calculated before, you reach the level of the critical point of water. The only way to also have it stay vapour, is to also have a temperature above that point: over 374 °C, or 705 °F for you imperials.

Well, when I say "vapour", I mean supercritical fluid, with some traces of nitrogen and oxygen dissolved in it.

Effectively making Earth a gas giant, albeit one with a tiny rocky core.

ETA: oh, btw, supercritical water is also a very good solvent for biological stuff. In case the pressure and temperature and lack of oxygen didn't kill you, that certainly would.

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And the tops of the clouds would reflect most of the sunlight, almost none at all getting through to ground level to nurture all those planets.

 

[SezMe]

Most boats have windows or portholes for looking out of. For ventilation they use vents, hatches, louvers, wind scoops or dorades. These allow air to be circulated without letting water in. Now if I commissioned a boat builder to make me a boat, I would expect him to include suitable ventilation devices without having to to tell him specifically what, where, and how many to install.

Sure. But god didn't commission a boat builder. He beamed his message down to some hundreds-of-years-old git in the middle of nowhere who had as much experience at boat building as Peter Rabbit.

That part of your argument fails.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

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Pendant!

Twenty years in the USN. Sailors hate walking home from work.

 

[HansMustermann]

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And the tops of the clouds would reflect most of the sunlight, almost none at all getting through to ground level to nurture all those planets.

The water vapour atmosphere would indeed form a layer of clouds at VERY high altitudes (we're talking 1000 times more gas in the atmosphere, so, yeah, lots of room to go upwards), where both temperature and pressure drop below the threshold to keep it critical. In fact, at very high altitudes, I'd even expect thick bands of ice crystals.

Not sure it would do much of a difference for any plants at ground level, though, because Earth's atmosphere would look like Neptune's either way. Given the sheer amount of water, even without those clouds, as much light would reach ground level as reaches the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Not that I'd expect plants as we know them, anyway. At that kind of temperature, pressure, without much of either O2 or CO2, in darkness, with some extreme winds, AND in a fluid that's very good at dissolving normal organic stuff, my bet would be on some extremophile bacterial colonies and not much else.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Didn't Hovind I claim there was a shell of ice around the Earth before the flood?

 

[HansMustermann]

Yep, and then it supposedly melted and fell down. That's where I got that water falling down from LEO scenario I calculated earlier in the thread.

 

[Kotatsu]

On the other hand, the water tanks they'd need to save some of the marine and river stuff would more than make up for that.

[...]

So, yeah, I hope the Lord also told Noah how to make a scuba suit and go collecting all species of shells and crabs and whatnot that live in the waters

Obviously, all extant fish are descended from Kryptolebias marmoratus, so Noah could just stack them in some sort of well aerated cylinder and spray them with water every two months or so. This makes sense, because all fish basically look the same.

Similarly, marine molluscs are all descended from slugs, and crustaceans from fiddler crabs. Other marine invertebrates are basically plants anyway, and these evidently survived perfectly fine under water, so it seems God has outsmarted you!

Not only that, but nowhere does it say that all the animals were adults. For example, a fully grown African Elephant can weigh over 7,000kg, but a new-born calf is only about 120kg.

Many reptiles and birds could have been taken on board while still in the egg. Also in some cases it may not have been necessary to take the whole animal. A worm can be cut in half and still survive, a giraffe with no legs is still a giraffe.

These organisms you mention are still anomalously large, and we can discount them entirely to make calculations easy.

Most animals are only millimeters long, if that, when young, so there is no problem whatsoever keeping virtually all organisms (except insects) in small zip-lock bags with a bit of water inside. Naturally, God would have provided Noah with a water-resistant sharpie so that he could write the species and origin of the contents on the zip-locks, so that species could be redistributed in ways that make plate-tectonic sense. The sharpie isn't mentioned in most modern bibles, due to an unresolved licensing issue.

Some distributional anomalies still occur, of course, but that's probably because God is a cheap bastard, and only gave Noah a single sharpie, which started running out of ink half-way through the Nematomorphs, and some bags thus became unreadable. This shows that it's always wise to bring your own sharpies when saving the world.

Insects can be stored as eggs, of course. Or possibly as pupae.

This incidentally solves the following problem:

Oh? Where would you put the animals, then?

They can probably be stored in a few medium-sized boxes, depending on how large the zip-lock bags are. Noah probably saved space by putting several non-carnivorous larvae in the same bag, provided they came from the same area. This may be how co-evolution actually started!

Besides that, nowhere in the Bible does it says that all the flood waters mixed with the oceans. Even if only a few pockets of salt and fresh water remained, it might still have been enough to keep alive a few individuals from each species.

Precisely! Just like in the Baltic, salt water would be denser than fresh water, and thus there would be two layers that don't mix. All the sea creatures (1) thus survived through God's ingenious invention of salt.

---
(1) They were saved because sea creatures do not sin. Sinning is an autapomorphy for primates, which has curiously also evolved convergently in some canines. This is evidence that the "aquatic ape theory" is true; the garden of Eden is another name for Atlantis, Adam and Eve were sea creatures, but ate a Sea Apple, and were dismissed onto land. Selection pressures in the shape of not having to worry about sharks (sloth), presence of land animals that openly show their dirty parts (lust), and encountering animals with awesome horns (envy) lead to the evolution in the descendants of A&E of the capability of sinning.
We are dealing with the consequences of this inopportune sea apple lunch even today. Many leading scientists therefore advocate driving the entire Holothuroidea to extinction, in the (vain) hope that that will solve this problem, or, at least, feel good inside (as revenge is always revenge). This is why trawling is so popular with marine ecologists.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

And you are some sort of authority on which is which?

No, but I don't have to be. It's generally obvious when the Bible is being specific and when it's being general, like in most books.

Didn't see your calculations, but they're wrong. The average elevation above sea level is ~250m, which leaves around 8500m to fill up. This means 8500000 l/m2*. Over 40 days that represents 8855 l/h. that's almost 9m/m2/h of precipitation.

This is all based on the idea that the entire globe was filled up over the tops of the tallest mountains (and assuming they were the same height as they are today). However nobody has any proof that this happened. Since such an event is (as you showed) highly improbable, I worked on the assumption that the Flood was actually more like actual floods that we know of (eg. the 1931 China floods which killed 4 million people) and that Noah was mistaken about how deep it was.

*not accounting for the excess water needed due to the shape of the Earth, since according to the Bible it's flat.

Sorry, but nowhere does the Bible say that the Earth is 'flat'. Some people have interpreted it to mean that, but others point out that the Earth was known to be round since long before the Bible was written. But anyway, if it was flat then that means everything we think we know about it is wrong, so any calculations based on mountain height, surface area etc. are probably wrong too.

Yes, but then don't try to pretend that there's any validity to it. God could have allowed a papier mâché Aark to survive a fire, and then a hurricane.

But He didn't (at least not according to the Bible), and who are we to second-guess why? Whatever His reasons, it just doesn't make sense that He would instruct Noah to build an Ark for the purpose of saving all the animals, then create weather conditions which ensured that it would be destroyed.

It may be hard for people who need to be force-fed every little detail of a story because they can't fill in the gaps, but the Bible would be 10 times longer and extremely tiresome if it was written like that. So why can't we just assume that God knew what He was doing and had all his bases covered?

because divine intervention doesn't count when you're talking about the real world.

So which is it? Are we considering the real world where an Ark would only have to navigate normal flood waters, or a fantasy one that has 8500000l/m2 over the entire world? This thread is supposed to be about whether the Ark would float, not be able to survive a ridiculous scenario that makes Waterworld look like a documentary.

I care almost as little about your disagreement as Physics does.

In my experience, many people are good at invoking science to prove that such-and-such is impossible, then when their theory is tested in the real world it turns out to be flawed. Mythbusters have a reputation for taking both seemingly impossible scenarios and 'scientific' objections, and showing whether they are true or false in the real world.

But here we have posters making 'scientific' assertions about boat construction and stresses without any supporting evidence. They remind me of those people who used 'science' to prove that an airplane can't take off from a conveyer belt, or that a yacht can't make headway by blowing on its own sail.

 

[Brainache]

No, but I don't have to be. It's generally obvious when the Bible is being specific and when it's being general, like in most books.

This is all based on the idea that the entire globe was filled up over the tops of the tallest mountains (and assuming they were the same height as they are today). However nobody has any proof that this happened. Since such an event is (as you showed) highly improbable, I worked on the assumption that the Flood was actually more like actual floods that we know of (eg. the 1931 China floods which killed 4 million people) and that Noah was mistaken about how deep it was.

Sorry, but nowhere does the Bible say that the Earth is 'flat'. Some people have interpreted it to mean that, but others point out that the Earth was known to be round since long before the Bible was written. But anyway, if it was flat then that means everything we think we know about it is wrong, so any calculations based on mountain height, surface area etc. are probably wrong too.

But He didn't (at least not according to the Bible), and who are we to second-guess why? Whatever His reasons, it just doesn't make sense that He would instruct Noah to build an Ark for the purpose of saving all the animals, then create weather conditions which ensured that it would be destroyed.

It may be hard for people who need to be force-fed every little detail of a story because they can't fill in the gaps, but the Bible would be 10 times longer and extremely tiresome if it was written like that. So why can't we just assume that God knew what He was doing and had all his bases covered?

So which is it? Are we considering the real world where an Ark would only have to navigate normal flood waters, or a fantasy one that has 8500000l/m2 over the entire world? This thread is supposed to be about whether the Ark would float, not be able to survive a ridiculous scenario that makes Waterworld look like a documentary.

In my experience, many people are good at invoking science to prove that such-and-such is impossible, then when their theory is tested in the real world it turns out to be flawed. Mythbusters have a reputation for taking both seemingly impossible scenarios and 'scientific' objections, and showing whether they are true or false in the real world.

But here we have posters making 'scientific' assertions about boat construction and stresses without any supporting evidence. They remind me of those people who used 'science' to prove that an airplane can't take off from a conveyer belt, or that a yacht can't make headway by blowing on its own sail.

Just ignoring for a second that the scientific evidence for why the Ark couldn't perform as advertised has already been provided, I'm curious about this interpretation of the Noah story.

If as you say, the ancient Israelites were not talking about the entire world being drowned and mankind given a fresh start through Noah and his family, what was the point of the story?

The whole point AFAIK was God destroying the world because of all the wickedness etc. I don't think the bible says anywhere that it was a purely local phenomenon.

So in your attempts to defend the bible story, you have to actually discard the bible story.

Doesn't that ring any alarm bells for you?

 

[I Ratant]

... Noah was mistaken about how deep it was.

...

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Noah is a character in a fictional story copied from a much older fictional story.

 

[bruto]

No, but I don't have to be. It's generally obvious when the Bible is being specific and when it's being general, like in most books.

This is all based on the idea that the entire globe was filled up over the tops of the tallest mountains (and assuming they were the same height as they are today). However nobody has any proof that this happened. Since such an event is (as you showed) highly improbable, I worked on the assumption ....

'whoops!
Stop right there. The Bible is right except where it's wrong. It's wrong except when it's right. If' we're going to allow assumption, why not dump the ridiculous ark itself?

 

[Roger Ramjets]

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Noah is a character in a fictional story copied from a much older fictional story.

Yes, I think everybody here knows that. So why we can't drop this silly requirement that the Ark that has to handle outlandish fictional weather, and just concentrate on whether it could float?

In the Epic of Gilgamesh a flood was invoked by 'gods' who inhabited a city on the banks of the Euphrates. Gilgamesh's 'boat' was a square box 120 cubits on each side, which was difficult to launch but "Erragal pulled out the mooring poles, forth went Ninurta and made the dikes overflow." This little detail shows that the ancients weren't complete idiots, and knew how to launch a large barge (hint, don't wait for a storm). But this story too is obvious fiction.

So let's get over the fact that the Bible isn't literally true, and consider whether if an Ark was made that met the specifications in the Bible, could it (theoretically) float or not? So far I haven't seen any scientific argument that it couldn't, just bald assertions such as 'the hull couldn't take the pressure' without any supporting figures.

 

[Iamme]

No, but I don't have to be. It's generally obvious when the Bible is being specific and when it's being general, like in most books.

This is all based on the idea that the entire globe was filled up over the tops of the tallest mountains (and assuming they were the same height as they are today). However nobody has any proof that this happened. Since such an event is (as you showed) highly improbable, I worked on the assumption that the Flood was actually more like actual floods that we know of (eg. the 1931 China floods which killed 4 million people) and that Noah was mistaken about how deep it was.

Sorry, but nowhere does the Bible say that the Earth is 'flat'. Some people have interpreted it to mean that, but others point out that the Earth was known to be round since long before the Bible was written. But anyway, if it was flat then that means everything we think we know about it is wrong, so any calculations based on mountain height, surface area etc. are probably wrong too.

But He didn't (at least not according to the Bible), and who are we to second-guess why? Whatever His reasons, it just doesn't make sense that He would instruct Noah to build an Ark for the purpose of saving all the animals, then create weather conditions which ensured that it would be destroyed.

It may be hard for people who need to be force-fed every little detail of a story because they can't fill in the gaps, but the Bible would be 10 times longer and extremely tiresome if it was written like that. So why can't we just assume that God knew what He was doing and had all his bases covered?

So which is it? Are we considering the real world where an Ark would only have to navigate normal flood waters, or a fantasy one that has 8500000l/m2 over the entire world? This thread is supposed to be about whether the Ark would float, not be able to survive a ridiculous scenario that makes Waterworld look like a documentary.

In my experience, many people are good at invoking science to prove that such-and-such is impossible, then when their theory is tested in the real world it turns out to be flawed. Mythbusters have a reputation for taking both seemingly impossible scenarios and 'scientific' objections, and showing whether they are true or false in the real world.

But here we have posters making 'scientific' assertions about boat construction and stresses without any supporting evidence. They remind me of those people who used 'science' to prove that an airplane can't take off from a conveyer belt, or that a yacht can't make headway by blowing on its own sail.

I`m not ''assuming'' nothing. I am always going to try to figure stuff out.
If someone said a leprechaun wrote the Bible, you just going to assume?
In your assuming...what is your assumption of how long God took to create? Remember, after each day of creation, that in Genesis, it said ''that the evening and morning were the ( _ ) day.'' (singular, not plural, as in evenings and days)

 

[I Am The Scum]

So let's get over the fact that the Bible isn't literally true, and consider whether if an Ark was made that met the specifications in the Bible, could it (theoretically) float or not? So far I haven't seen any scientific argument that it couldn't, just bald assertions such as 'the hull couldn't take the pressure' without any supporting figures.

If floating is all that concerns you, then let's just say that the ark was a bunch of planks held together with mud. Yeah, it'll float. Staying together is another matter.

 

[bruto]

Yes, I think everybody here knows that. So why we can't drop this silly requirement that the Ark that has to handle outlandish fictional weather, and just concentrate on whether it could float?

In the Epic of Gilgamesh a flood was invoked by 'gods' who inhabited a city on the banks of the Euphrates. Gilgamesh's 'boat' was a square box 120 cubits on each side, which was difficult to launch but "Erragal pulled out the mooring poles, forth went Ninurta and made the dikes overflow." This little detail shows that the ancients weren't complete idiots, and knew how to launch a large barge (hint, don't wait for a storm). But this story too is obvious fiction.

So let's get over the fact that the Bible isn't literally true, and consider whether if an Ark was made that met the specifications in the Bible, could it (theoretically) float or not? So far I haven't seen any scientific argument that it couldn't, just bald assertions such as 'the hull couldn't take the pressure' without any supporting figures.

Point taken, but where do we separate speculation from reality here? Do we say it could have floated even though it could not be built? If the specifications call for a structure that cannot have been made as specified, what is it that floats? To begin with, we cannot take your approach and then significantly modify the specifications handed down, and that means our ark cannot be simply a barge. It must be three hundred cubits long, 50 wide, and thirty cubits tall and have three decks.

So let's momentarily overlook the quarter million square feet of pitch, the putative gopherwood forests and the half century or more it would take to build the ark as specified.

Most of the references I've seen suggest that something in the range of 300 feet is the limit for a wooden boat not to hog and sag to the point of structural failure, and that longer wooden ships, even when reinforced with iron and held in tension by multiple large masts, were troublesome at best, twisting under duress, and leaking like crazy.

Of course the ark need not sail particularly well, only stay afloat. But since the specifications do not include pumps, it must at least have had to do that without opening up too badly.

I would think the first thing to research (I'll let someone else with more time tonight do this) is whether an all-wooden ship as large as the ark has ever been floated, and if not, why not. Of course we can't likely come up with a definitive "couldn't" if nobody ever tried it, but given the centuries that have passed (including the long life attributed to Noah himself after the flood), someone ought to have come close, and if smaller attempts have been a dead end, it should count for something.

So far the argument for a floatable ark seems to amount to the fact that nobody has ever been fool enough to build one, and thus none has been seen to sink.