A multi-hull! Trimaran or even quadmaran .... case solved.
Noah's Ark could float! (theoretically)
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A multi-hull! Trimaran or even quadmaran .... case solved.
Cainkane1
Philosopher
The ancients knew how to make boats. Its my guess they built barges based on smaller versions of the biblical ark. Floating barns to move cattle and such. The description of the ark was written by someone who imagined a large ship and he exaggerated the proportions.
Gawdzilla Sama
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I imagine the triremes were close to the largest ships done in the Bronze Age.
And I hear there were a thousand of those.
And I hear there were a thousand of those.
Gawdzilla Sama
121.92-meter mutant fire-breathing lizard-thingy
How would that solve the hogging issue, please?
HansMustermann
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Actually, to answer that bronze age question too, the largest documented from the bronze age was Hatshepsut's barge, estimated anywhere between sixty-something and ninety-something metres long (pretty much 200 to 300 ft or so), and used to haul obelisks on the Nile. I'm finding it easier to believe dimensions towards the lower end of the interval, personally.
NB, though, there is a reason I keep stressing Mediterranean and respectively the Nile. The waves you'd ever have to deal with on the Nile are measured at most in inches. So you don't need tremendous structural rigidity and strength there.
NB, though, there is a reason I keep stressing Mediterranean and respectively the Nile. The waves you'd ever have to deal with on the Nile are measured at most in inches. So you don't need tremendous structural rigidity and strength there.
Gawdzilla Sama
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No storms during the 150 days they floated around?
bruto
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The pitch in question, apparently making a sunlight-activated polymer, might possibly indicate more exposure or study, not that it makes a lot of difference in the end.
MRC_Hans
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How do we know about bronce nails? Early ships were assembled with wood dowels.
Hans
MRC_Hans
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We might assume that god gave him blue-prints.
No, as I point out, that is not possible.
None. They built excellent ships, but none that size. The Egyptians built Nile barges that were quite large, but none that size, and a river barge needs not handle waves of any significance.
Hans
tyr_13
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The proposals for wood used in large buildings that normally use steel and concrete of course don't use standard wood but engineered products that couldn't reasonably be created back then. OSB, MDF, plywood, and of course the one that makes larger superstructure possible, CLT. Some of the same principles could be used in olden times, but the product wouldn't be anywhere near as strong or versatile as new products like CLT.
I really want to build using some CLT sometime, and play with designs using it...
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Gawdzilla Sama
121.92-meter mutant fire-breathing lizard-thingy
In another place I read that a rather large amount of heat would be released when a volume of water 23,000+ feet deep and covering the entire planet was to fall. Is that correct, and if so, how did he keep the wooden boat from catching fire?
MRC_Hans
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Actually there is a thesis that the author of the biblical Noah myth was describing Egyptian barges for transporting obelisks. The largest is thought to have a displacement of 1500 tons and a length of some 50 meters. Iti s depicted on a relief in the Deir el-Bahri temple and is showing the obelisks placed end-to end. This would give the ship dimensions approaching that of the Ark. However, the Egyptians never used perspective, so we must assume that they were really placed side-by side (nothing else would make sense), reducing the ship to one half that size.
Whoever put the Noah myth into words might have seen that relief.
Hans
tsig
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To say nothing of all that volcanic activity accompanying mountains growing by 20,000 feet in 150 days and tectonic plates skimming around at high speed.
CORed
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Creationists say "no waves". So that takes care of that
The entire world was flooded but there were no waves. That pretty much would have to mean no wind was blowing in the entire world. Every bit as impossible as a wooden boat big enough to hold all the animals being seaworthy.
CORed
Penultimate Amazing
My understanding (which I will not rule out being itself an urban legend) is that somebody back in the 1950's (could even be earlier) did calculations based on the assumption that a bumblebee was a fixed-wing aircraft, and reached the conclusion that it shouldn't be able to fly. Of course, bumblebees posses neither a propeller or jet engine, and fly by moving their wings very rapidly. So the calculations were probably correct, but since they were based on a faulty assumptions, they reached a nonsensical conclusion.
Gawdzilla Sama
121.92-meter mutant fire-breathing lizard-thingy
True. And four tenths of an inch of rain, minimum, EVERY MINUTE, is way heavier than I've seen before, and I've ridden out more than one hurricane.
BowlOfRed
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When things fall in a gravitational field, they gain energy that could later be released as heat. 23,000 feet of water is a lot of mass, so you'd have a lot of energy.
Of course, that energy is spread across that same mass of water. If you knew the height that the water began at, you could calculate the temperature rise of the water itself.
We don't know know the starting temperature of the water, or the starting altitude of the rain. If either of those figures happen to have been recorded, I'll do the calculation.
HansMustermann
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Water also has a rather large heat capacity. In fact, its specific heat of 4.186 joule/gram*K it's larger than for almost anything else around you. It can soak a LOT of heat. And it has an even higher latent heat of vaporization, if it were to come to boiling point. So I wouldn't worry much about anything catching fire.
BUT you are onto something...
But anyway, to use SI and back-of-napkin calculations, 1 kg of water can soak a little over 4000 joule to raise its temperature by 1K (or 1 celsius, they're the same for temperature differences.) 1 Joule is the work for pushing with a force of 1 Newton for 1m. Earth's gravity is almost 10 Newtons per kg.
The kilograms actually simplify out of that, since you have them both on the side of how many Newtons pull that water downwards, and on the side of how much heat capacity you have. So, lucky us.
Anyway, so you'd need to drop that water about 400m for it to go up 1 degree, assuming of course it were completely isolated. Rain for example sinks most of that energy into the air and ground.
Or you could drop it from about 40,000m (130,000 ft), to go from freezing to boiling. Of course, if it's really isolated, or enough of it to completely overwhelm any energy sinks. At first the existing water and the atmosphere would soak most of that heat. But eventually there'd be just too much kinetic energy to dissipate, and those would not do much more to keep it cool.
Now Genesis 7:11 tells us: "on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened." Well, there isn't all that much water underground, compared to the scale of the flood, so probably most of that came from the "floodgates of the heavens", i.e., was droppend from space.
Let's say the lowest limit of LEO, or about 80 km...
Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?
Yep, that's twice the temperature needed to bring such water from freezing to boiling. Which would be the main thing that keeps temperature in check, by the end, via latent heat of vaporization. (Of course, then you'd need to pour even more water in, to reach the same altitude in spite of most of it boiling off.)
So, anyway, would I worry about the boat catching fire? No. I'd worry about Noah breathing in air at 100 degrees Celsius for the next few days. Well, for the next minute before croaking horribly, really.
ETA: Though in air completely saturated with water vapour, so perspiration doesn't help, he'd probably die of heat stroke MUCH earlier. He'd start getting hit the the really crap end of that by 40 celsius. Which is just ok, because if he survived just day more than that, temperatures would reach pain level. Full body and lung pain.
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More probably not, as a giant boat (200 feet cube) features already in the story of Utnapishtim that was included in Epic of Gilgamesh. While the story probably wasn't in the very first version of the epic and no one knows exactly when it was added to it, it was certainly known in the Old Babylonian period that predates the building of Deir-el-Bahri by centuries.