How big would Noah's Ark have to be?

plindboe

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How big would Noah's Ark have to be, to be able to contain two kinds of all the animal species in the world, and the food in order to keep them fed for a year? I'm thinking the boat would have to be the size of Greenland or something. :D I posted in this forum to see if some would try to make some calculations on it. Just for fun. ;)
 
Ithink you would have to 1st figure out the total weight of the creatures and estimate a ratio of food weight to animal weight. If I remember correctly in one part of the bible it says two of each and in another it says something about two of each clean animal and seven of each unclean. Something to that effect anyway. Don't know which figures to use and I'm not really interested enough to research it. Maybe someone else will.

Also need someone knowledgeable in structural engineering to make sure the ark design will support the weight during bad weather.
 
You don't have to work out how big it would have to be. According to Genesis chpter 6, the ark was made of gopher wood and was 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide by 30 cubits deep.

Since a cubit is 17.6 inches or about 45cm. this gives you a total of around 40,000 cubic metres, assuming a rather square and un-hydrodynamic arc. Alternatively, you've got three floors, totalling around 9000 square metres of floor space, plus a roof if your animals don't mind getting wet.

Somehow, you have to fit 14 of each clean and 2 of each unclean animal.

Are elephants clean or not? Anybody know? How about hippos and rhinos?

Of course you have to travel round the world collecting them in the first place. Those polar bears are quite tricky to get, sailing from the middle east to the arctic in a gopher wood ocean liner with no engine. Unless pandas, kangaroos, penguins and the like were all living in and around the middle east at this point. Of course, if you argue that this was the case then you have to accept that Noah must have sailed round dropping them all off on different continents afterwards.

The problems with the ark are just beginning. After all the creative packing and circumnavigation you've done, you need to work 24 hour shifts feeding at one end and shovelling at the other for every single animal.

Assuming you haven't been mauled by any of the vicious ones, trampled by one of the heavy ones or suffered a nervous breakdown by this point.

And while we're on the subject, just how hard would it have to rain to cover all land masses on the planet in 40 days? And where did all the water go?

And why do I care anyway?
 
plindboe said:
How big would Noah's Ark have to be, to be able to contain two kinds of all the animal species in the world, and the food in order to keep them fed for a year? I'm thinking the boat would have to be the size of Greenland or something. :D I posted in this forum to see if some would try to make some calculations on it. Just for fun. ;)

I'm think you could slap together an ark the size of England that would probably be big enough. Of course it would take quite a lot of materials to make an ark that big. Noah must have been a very fast worker to be able to assemble such a vessel in such a short time.

Wait, I've got it! God must have given Noah an incredible shrinking ray, that way all of the life forms could be shrunk down to a couple of hundred nanometers each. That would have solved everything.

Maybe Noah was into homeopathy. He could have made dilutions of creatures and stored their essence as water memory, and then he could just reconstitute the organisms by further diluting his dilutions.

Clearly Noah was thinking outside of the box
 
There's an excellent analysis of this subject in the book Telling Lies For God, Professor Ian Plimer.

Basically, the 3 million plus species would not have fitted in the ark of dimensions as described in a pink fit. Using the dimensions given, they had an allocated space of less than a coffee-cup per pair of animals, not counting their food and water requirements. And there were a lot of other requirements for "a successful cruise" that make this just a laff-a-minute story.
 
Hamish :"Are elephants clean or not? Anybody know? How about hippos and rhinos?"

No, but remember that there was no coast guard so you can dump the doo-doo over the side.
The problem of supplying that mana for 40 days -n- 40 nights however is a relm for a rabbi or priest cuz I'm an expert in doo-doo and not theology.
 
Here's an alternative wording of the above question:
"How large a biosphere is needed to sustain all of Earth's biodiversity for the period of 40 days?"

To make an informed guess, I'd have to say a biosphere about the size of the Earth. After all, there are millions of species of animals living today, and all of those would need to eat, breathe and so forth. (Nobody ever seems to care about saving the plants from the flood.)

To get around this, fundamantalists claim that Noah didn't actually load representatives of every single species onto the ark. Instead, there were only "kinds", which afterwards rapidly microevolved into modern species. These "kinds" have never been defined in any meaningful way, so it's basically impossible to name the amount of animals that need to be housed on the ark.

An example: Are "rabbits" a kind? That's a couple dozen species. Maybe "rabbits and hares" are a kind - over fifty species. If all lagomorphs are a single kind, you have more than 80 species under that umbrella. And of course, there's no need for kinds to conform to any scientific taxonomy.

So you can see the problem.

(Personally, I find speculating about the literal truth of biblical stories oddly fascinating. It's like discussing the physiology of grandma-swallowing wolves.)
 
Something a lot of you seem to be missing is that insects are not animals this reduces you carrying buden somewhat. Still I want to know what Noah did with all the lemmings born during the vogage.
 
For the fundamentalist believers, it is a pertinent question.

For those who understand that the stories are to be interpreted metaphorically, etc., it isn't really a big deal as I understand.
 
Hamish said:
And while we're on the subject, just how hard would it have to rain to cover all land masses on the planet in 40 days?
29000ft/40days/24hours * 12inches/ft = 362 inches per hour

hmm, that sound's quite reasonable. :p
 
Haven't you guys ever heard of miracles? :D

No, don't ask why the miracle happened to be that he could get all those animals in the boat instead of the miracle being that he didn't need to do so. That's just being picky.
 
T'ai Chi said:
For the fundamentalist believers, it is a pertinent question.

For those who understand that the stories are to be interpreted metaphorically, etc., it isn't really a big deal as I understand.
Figures some ungodly asian creature would say somthing like that

It is in the bable ... er bible and god said it . Thats good enuf fer me

( damn yellow hoards)
 
I said


For the fundamentalist believers, it is a pertinent question.

For those who understand that the stories are to be interpreted metaphorically, etc., it isn't really a big deal as I understand.


then you said:

TillEulenspiegel said:

Figures some ungodly asian creature would say somthing like that

It is in the bable ... er bible and god said it . Thats good enuf fer me

( damn yellow hoards)

er...yeah...um...yeah..Billy??...ummm...yeah.. OK..
 
Well, if you look at fuddie sites, they explain that you only need one "kind" of animal on the ark.

So there is one "cow" kind, one "dog" kind, etc.

The problem comes when you add "ant" kinds or "beetle" kinds.

If there was one "ant" kind on the ark, that would mean that more than 1 species of ant evolved PER YEAR since the ark landed.

If there was one "beetle" kind on the ark, that would mean that more than 50 species of beetle evolved PER YEAR since the ark landed.

In fact, beetles should be evolving so fast that we could put a couple in an aquarium and WATCH THEM EVOLVE into a new species.
 

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