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Noah's Ark could float! (theoretically)

Kotatsu said:
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.
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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.

Because here's one thought. Once you start just pouring water, first you kill all the fresh water species by osmosis pressure differential, once their habitat becomes salt water. Then if you keep adding rain water (which doesn't contain salt,) the salinity drops and you kill the salt water species, as their cells start bursting.

But even if you did add salt water somehow, here's another thought: by the time you covered all the mountains with water, you killed all the molluscs and even the bacterial films in the water. Because above a pressure, calcium becomes soluble, and pretty much ruins any life form based on it not being.

Plus, 40 days at a different depth than they're fit for, means most would asphyxiate anyway.

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 :p
 
Gawdzilla said:
Still wondering how Noah would have bent the planks if it wasn't a plain old rectangular box.
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Irrelevant, because the Ark was a box. It was only meant to float like a barge, not travel at speed (which would have been pointless since it had no sails or oars).

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.
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Trees don't grow perfectly straight so curved timbers are generally available, and the curved parts of a large ship are made out of multiple pieces anyway.

Kotatsu said:
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.
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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.
 
HansMustermann said:
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.

Because here's one thought. Once you start just pouring water, first you kill all the fresh water species by osmosis pressure differential, once their habitat becomes salt water. Then if you keep adding rain water (which doesn't contain salt,) the salinity drops and you kill the salt water species, as their cells start bursting.

But even if you did add salt water somehow, here's another thought: by the time you covered all the mountains with water, you killed all the molluscs and even the bacterial films in the water. Because above a pressure, calcium becomes soluble, and pretty much ruins any life form based on it not being.

Plus, 40 days at a different depth than they're fit for, means most would asphyxiate anyway.

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 :p
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Very interesting.

Also, wouldn't the ice caps have floated off, due to the huge increase in depth of the oceans?
 
HansMustermann said:
Because here's one thought. Once you start just pouring water, first you kill all the fresh water species by osmosis pressure differential, once their habitat becomes salt water. Then if you keep adding rain water (which doesn't contain salt,) the salinity drops and you kill the salt water species, as their cells start bursting.
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But you are assuming that ocean salinity was the same then as it is now. It is a well known fact that the seas have become saltier over time. The fact that many marine species cannot survive in fresh water today may be because they have adapted to increased salinity since the Flood.

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.

But even if you did add salt water somehow, here's another thought: by the time you covered all the mountains with water, you killed all the molluscs and even the bacterial films in the water. Because above a pressure, calcium becomes soluble, and pretty much ruins any life form based on it not being.
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Nonsense, it would only kill things below a certain depth. Since ancient seashells have been found near the tops of mountains it is obvious that the flood did occur, and that molluscs were growing there. ;)

BTW it wasn't that deep anyway, it's just that the mountains were very low:-

Genesis 7:20
15 cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
 
Gawdzilla said:
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.
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Nah, bending planks is not a big problem as such. If you are in a hurry, you place them in a steam box for a couple of hours and they are ready to use, but if you have plenty of time, you just fix them in one end and haul, wedge and tie them in over a few days. Excellent wooden ships were built by bronce age cultures, several places in the world.

The problem is size. Basically, no matter what material you use, there is a scale limit: If you double the size of a structure, the section of structural members is quadroubled, but their weight becomes 8 times higher. Of course, this can, to a degree, be offset by cantilevering and other lightweight structures, but there comes a point where the material is simply not able to sustain its own weight, and for wood, this is so that no wooden ship has been known to exist that is over about 300ft in length (and even those had steel reinforcements).

Remember that if the Ark were to carry 50,000 tons of payload, the hull had to withstand a corresponding pressure of water from the outside, and distribute it to solid internal loads (if you carry a fluid cargo, like tankers, you can cut corners, but that is another matter).

So even without going into the impossible logistics of the whole project, building a sea-going vessel of that loading capacity from wood alone is impossible.

I simply cannot understand why even bible fundamentalists are so hard-bound on trying to make this tall tale real. Hey, its a fat legend warning humans of the immense power of your god; just leave it at that, you are only loosing credibility by all these ridiculous antics.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
I simply cannot understand why even bible fundamentalists are so hard-bound on trying to make this tall tale real. Hey, its a fat legend warning humans of the immense power of your god; just leave it at that, you are only loosing credibility by all these ridiculous antics.
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They already lost all credibility by believing in their impossibly powerful god, the rest is just sugarcoating.

The tale of Noah building the Ark may be farfetched, but it's nothing compared to other ridiculous antics in the Bible. We can imagine a real scenario (local farmer builds a boat to save his family and livestock from rising flood waters) which has merely been embellished. Compare that to a woman being turned into a pillar of salt, or a man who can walk on water and survive his own death!
 
MRC_Hans said:
Isn't that the one that is built on a steel barge?

Hans
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And steel framed. And smaller than the bible says.
George said:
This is what immediately sprung to my mind:


I sooo wanted that to be true. Curse those Snopes people.
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I'm so stealing that for my Doctor Who RPG.........
:D
MRC_Hans said:
Nah, bending planks is not a big problem as such. If you are in a hurry, you place them in a steam box for a couple of hours and they are ready to use, but if you have plenty of time, you just fix them in one end and haul, wedge and tie them in over a few days. Excellent wooden ships were built by bronce age cultures, several places in the world.

The problem is size. Basically, no matter what material you use, there is a scale limit: If you double the size of a structure, the section of structural members is quadroubled, but their weight becomes 8 times higher. Of course, this can, to a degree, be offset by cantilevering and other lightweight structures, but there comes a point where the material is simply not able to sustain its own weight, and for wood, this is so that no wooden ship has been known to exist that is over about 300ft in length (and even those had steel reinforcements).

Remember that if the Ark were to carry 50,000 tons of payload, the hull had to withstand a corresponding pressure of water from the outside, and distribute it to solid internal loads (if you carry a fluid cargo, like tankers, you can cut corners, but that is another matter).

So even without going into the impossible logistics of the whole project, building a sea-going vessel of that loading capacity from wood alone is impossible.

I simply cannot understand why even bible fundamentalists are so hard-bound on trying to make this tall tale real. Hey, its a fat legend warning humans of the immense power of your god; just leave it at that, you are only loosing credibility by all these ridiculous antics.

Hans
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And where did all the bronze nails come from?
 
Earthborn said:
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.
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As soon as you deploy it there will be stresses that could break the thing in two.

It's just not feasible.
 
MRC_Hans said:
Nah, bending planks is not a big problem as such. If you are in a hurry, you place them in a steam box for a couple of hours and they are ready to use, but if you have plenty of time, you just fix them in one end and haul, wedge and tie them in over a few days. Excellent wooden ships were built by bronce age cultures, several places in the world.
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In 2304 BC, by a guy who had never built a boat before? A boat that size? Which Bronze Age cultures built ships that size?
 
Megalodon said:
Check this out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Selma_(1919)
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Not to mention ferrocement, which makes a pretty nice boat hull (like concrete, except thinner, and applied like plaster over a mesh frame). My initial suggestion that a stone ark would have floated in the Biblical world was predicated on Biblical technology and resources. When arguing needlessly about whether a wooden boat might have floated, we also don't include speculation about plywood, waterproof glue and balsa-cored fiberglass.
 
bruto said:
Not to mention ferrocement, which makes a pretty nice boat hull (like concrete, except thinner, and applied like plaster over a mesh frame). My initial suggestion that a stone ark would have floated in the Biblical world was predicated on Biblical technology and resources. When arguing needlessly about whether a wooden boat might have floated, we also don't include speculation about plywood, waterproof glue and balsa-cored fiberglass.
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Or a death star.
 
bruto said:
. . . the ark story includes a specification of some kind of pitch, which I have heard turns out to be a primitive polymer that actually might have worked pretty well. Of course all this means is that whoever wrote the Bible knew a tiny bit about boat building, but it's mildly interesting.
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"Had seen a boat in his lifetime" would suffice to know that pitch was important for slowing leaks.
 
Gawdzilla said:
In 2304 BC, by a guy who had never built a boat before? A boat that size? Which Bronze Age cultures built ships that size?
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To put it in perspective, the biggest ship that the ancients built in the maritime arms race on the Mediterranean was the Tessarakonteres of Ptolemy IV Philopator, in the 3rd century BC. So no longer bronze age.

It was an 128m long catamaran. In effect, two very large and relatively narrow galleys with a bridge built between them.

And even that one Plutarch tells us that it wasn't a good ship, and was slow and dangerous to move even in the relatively calm waters of the Mediterranean. In fact, that it was only for show.

(I guess Ptolemy discovered showboating;))
 
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