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Noah's Ark could float! (theoretically)

Earthborn said:
When it is raining so hard that there literally is more water above your boat than under it, I think getting drinking water is the least of your problems. Food is a more serious issue, and the animals and people on board would probably be near starving, but it might have been survivable; some of the bodies of all those wicked people would have floated up eventually.
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There's probably loads of available weight that could be used for food once it's taken into account that virtually all vertebrates are of anomalous size, and that the average weight of an animal on the ark would be at least one, probably close to two, order of magnitudes smaller than the 23.47kg they used.

For instance, there are almost as many known species of nematodes as there are mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles put together (25,000 vs. ~32,000, using numbers from Wikipedia), and there are almost twice as many known species of weevils as there are known terrestrial vertebrates (~60,000). Members of both of these groups are generally smaller than half a centimeter, and weigh practically nothing.

As these groups are virtually weightless and very tiny, we can conclude that an almost infinite amount of animals could have been stored on the ark (we can discount outliers), and still most of the ark would have been available for food!
 
MRC_Hans said:
Isn't that the one that is built on a steel barge?

Hans
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From Wiki:

The Bible reports Noah was commanded to build an ark having a length of 300 cubits, a width of 50 cubits, and a height of 30 cubits.[1] Johan's Ark is half the length of that given in the Bible, 150 cubits or 70 metres, 30 cubits high and 20 cubits wide.[2] Huibers built the structure in the river port of Schagen, 45 km north of Amsterdam, taking one and a half years.

While the Bible specified that the Ark had to be built from the unknown gopher wood, the interpretation is a steel frame skinned with American Cedar and Pine and built on top of a steel barge.[1] The Ark contains models of various animals, and other displays.

A full-sized (135 m / 450 ft) version is in Dordrecht, open to the public.[4] This Ark is carried on a platform made up of 25 LASH barges and has a coaster's seaworthiness license.

So - mostly steel barges.... (and even then only seaworthy in coastal waters)

C'mon - how much more realistic could that be?

:)
 
Earthborn said:
Here's a teeny tiny bit of evidence that might require you to revise that claim a bit.
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As others have pointed out, that ark is a total modern fake. It's way smaller and uses steel in both the construction and to actually keep it afloat.
Once actual wooden ships start getting above 80 m in length or so they need reinforcement to become stable.
And even before that they require engineering feats that simply would not be available to a bronze age goatherder.
 
Still wondering how Noah would have bent the planks if it wasn't a plain old rectangular box. Some of you know that there was an industry that grew trees to the shape of certain parts of a wooden ship because they were too large to steam and the composite alternative was considered inferior in strength.
 
Rincewind said:
From Wiki:

The Bible reports Noah was commanded to build an ark having a length of 300 cubits, a width of 50 cubits, and a height of 30 cubits.[1] Johan's Ark is half the length of that given in the Bible, 150 cubits or 70 metres, 30 cubits high and 20 cubits wide.[2] Huibers built the structure in the river port of Schagen, 45 km north of Amsterdam, taking one and a half years.

While the Bible specified that the Ark had to be built from the unknown gopher wood, the interpretation is a steel frame skinned with American Cedar and Pine and built on top of a steel barge.[1] The Ark contains models of various animals, and other displays.

A full-sized (135 m / 450 ft) version is in Dordrecht, open to the public.[4] This Ark is carried on a platform made up of 25 LASH barges and has a coaster's seaworthiness license.

So - mostly steel barges.... (and even then only seaworthy in coastal waters)

C'mon - how much more realistic could that be?

:)
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Gopher wood was a type of epoxy and the pitch was the fixative so when combined they made a substance 12 times stronger than steel.

:)

(I think my explanations are better than AIG's.)
 
rwguinn said:
It's raining like a cow on a flat rock, all the "founts of the deep" have opened up, they got 30,000 feet of rain in 40 days, and there's no waves?
I want some of whatever they're smoking...
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Sailing ships used oil to help calm the waters on the Ark they had the Oil of the Ark of the Covenant so it calmed the waters for miles around.:)
 
rwguinn said:
It's raining like a cow on a flat rock, all the "founts of the deep" have opened up, they got 30,000 feet of rain in 40 days, and there's no waves?
I want some of whatever they're smoking...
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DGM said:
Well........there's an image I didn't need this morning (having witnessed this sort of thing on a farm).

I never heard that expression before. See, you learn something new everyday. :D
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This is what immediately sprung to my mind:

In 1997, the crew of a Japanese fishing boat was pulled from the Sea of Japan after clinging to the boat's wreckage for several hours. To a man they claimed a cow had fallen from the sky apparently coming from nowhere and struck the boat amidships resulting in a huge hole and its rapid sinking. They were immediately arrested.

The crew remained in prison for several weeks until Japanese authorities were contacted by several highly embarrassed Russian air force officials.

It turned out that the crew of a Russian cargo plane had stolen a cow that wandered near their Siberian airfield and forced it onto their plane before they took off for a flight home.
Once airborne the cow apparently panicked and starting rampaging through the cargo hold causing the crew also to panic because it was affecting the plane's stability. They solved the problem by shoving the cow out of the hold while crossing the Sea of Japan at 30,000 feet.
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I sooo wanted that to be true. Curse those Snopes people.
 
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DGM said:
Well........there's an image I didn't need this morning (having witnessed this sort of thing on a farm).

I never heard that expression before. See, you learn something new everyday. :D
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That actually is long used and of honorable descent. I am fairly sure that farmers in the New England area were well aware of it and had no doubt of it's descriptive power......,:)
 
What is someone really bought the farm....and paid $1.2M for it?
He bought the farm, right?
 
Iamme said:
The Lord made a bumblebee which should not be able to fly, fly. He formed Adam of dust, and Eve from a rib. Jesus could walk on water and raise the dead.
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None of that juju has a bit of evidence to support it.
 
John Jones said:
None of that juju has a bit of evidence to support it.
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True enough, and of course one can never be entirely sure with Iamme, but I suspect what he is saying is that if you buy that package, then it's silly to speculate on whether the ark could float. In this world a stone ark would float.

In another thread with one of those folks so utterly without humor or perspective that he did not get it, I suggested that this is sort of like arguing whether the fire extinguishers on the Death Star met code.
 
bruto said:
True enough, and of course one can never be entirely sure with Iamme, but I suspect what he is saying is that if you buy that package, then it's silly to speculate on whether the ark could float. In this world a stone ark would float.

In another thread with one of those folks so utterly without humor or perspective that he did not get it, I suggested that this is sort of like arguing whether the fire extinguishers on the Death Star met code.
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:D:D:D:D:D
 
MRC_Hans said:
Isn't that the one that is built on a steel barge?
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Yes, kinda disappointing, isn't it? For a moment I thought the guy chose a more "authentic" design than his previous ark. Still I think it should be possible to build an wooden ship of similar size that would not be reduced into splinters in a matter of minutes on a calm sea; it may require some rather unconventional ship geometry. There are plans for actual wooden skyscrapers, so boat building is not the biggest problem with The Flood story.
 
bruto said:
In this world a stone ark would float.
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Depending on the design a stone ark might very well float. Plenty of stones have less density than the steel used in shipbuilding. Its hull would need to be quite thin and fragile, so it would be a lot more of a challenge to keep it from breaking in a matter of minutes on a calm sea than a wooden ark.
 
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