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Noah's Ark could float! (theoretically)

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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The one in the movie is a pretty good guess at what would have been possible.
A rectangular box. With many joints along the length to open up when the sea got wavy.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
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!
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Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 11... the first version of the Flood myth.
 
CORed said:
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.
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The bees can't read either, and didn't know they'd been grounded, and kept on buzzing around.
 
BowlOfRed said:
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.
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There was the 'vapor canopy' above the earth which contained all that water. Compute how much that much water weighs, and how much atmospheric pressure there had to be to keep it up there in the form of clouds, and how thick those clouds would be, and what the tops of the clouds would do to the albedo of the planet, and how much sunlight would get through that cloud mass (none) ...
There's no sane way to have that 'vapor canopy' at all!
 
BTW, just for the record, the idea of the water coming essentially from space isn't even mine. Kent Hovind for example proposed essentially the same scenario in all seriousness.

But now to your question...

Water being vapour isn't much better, though. In fact, it's worse. See, water is a greenhouse gas. While albedo would somewhat counter it, a few thousands of years of Earth having literally more water vapour than air as an atmosphere (i.e., for all the time before Noah), in an age mere thousands of years ago (we did have a methane atmosphere, but that was billions of years ago, when the sun was just warming up) is literally a Venus scenario. The global warming would run off waay past the point of irreversible, and by now there'd be no oceans and we'd have a surface temperature that could melt lead.

Plus, here's a fun fact. The mass of the Earth's atmosphere is about 6x1018 kg. (Well, 5.9, but I'm rounding here for back-of-napkin calculations.)

To cover Earth in water past the top of the highest mountain, i.e., Everest. that would be almost 9000m worth of extra water level. Earth's surface is a little over 5x108 square kilometres, which is to say, 5x1014 square metres. Multiply by 9000 metres, that's about 4.5x1018 cubic metres of water, which weighs about a ton per cubic metre, so let's say (rounding again) about 5x1021 kilograms of water.

(It's not absolutely exact, since it's a spherical thing, not a cylinder, so actually there would be a little more water, but I already rounded up, so it will have to do.)

I.e., to account for that, literally there'd be 1000 times more water vapour in the air than there is air.

The trivial implication is the one that answers your question about atmospheric pressure: yeah, think 1000 times the current atmospheric pressure. (Which would also make our kind of biology even more impossible than it sounds, since as I was saying, the solubility of some key elements changes at that kind of pressure.)

The maybe less obvious one is that if all the oxygen is spread in 1000 times more atmosphere, God's land creations would be breathing in about 0.02% oxygen. And die promptly.

(You can always count on me to do bible calculations, eh?:p)
 
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I've got it! It's so obvious to me now.

This "gopher wood" wasn't a whole species of tree, but a single, massive "one-off" tree (the Tree of Life from Eden? Yggdrasil?). Yahweh (or was it Thor?) loaned Noah a bolt of lightning to carve up the ultra-hard gopher into the world's largest dugout canoe.
 
nelsondogg said:
Maybe this site? He calculates the temp would go up 1800K.

http://www.holysmoke.org/cretins/fludmath.htm
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Well, their maths has the problem that it calculates the equilibrium temperature between raw energy input, vs raw energy radiated, but that's wrong because it's not an equilibrium scenario. In fact, as I showed before, most of that energy would go into heating the water, not in directly and immediately being radiated into space.

Basically an equilibrium scenario would involve a constant temperature, in which exactly as much energy is radiated back as falls down. But actually that's not a given.
 
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Correa Neto said:
Folks, gopher wood had inobtanium fibers. Thus, the ark would resist.
Noah used all the world's gopher trees to build the ark. Thus, you will not find them around now.
The LORD GOD saw that gopher trees would grow nearby the ark's construction site and only there. Thus, only Noah could build a floodworthy ship. Praise the LORD!

Send money and repent.
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When you can sell tickets on a ship that will never be built you will be at Ken Ham's level.:)
 
HansMustermann said:
Actually, no, the KJV translation of Genesis 7:20 is just misleading. The verb "prevail" there in the original it also means "surpass". So the sentence actually said it rose, surpassing the highest mountains by 15 cubits (about 7m or 22ft).
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This reminds me how confusing the KJV is; it says clean animals "by sevenS, the male and his female." which could mean 7 male and 7 female or just 7 total.
Many other bible translations (NIV, RSV, ESV) have Chapter 7 say "seven pairs" or 'seven couples'.

So the 'correct' answer is 14 clean animals.

Source:
http://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/8170/jewish/Chapter-7.htm
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+7&version=RSV -there's a pulldown box with different translations
 
Two small words that knock the possibility of an ark actually floating for any length of time.
Hogging and Sagging.
Theres always the question of who was pumping the bilges or had time to feed and muck out all those animals.
 
BowlOfRed said:
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.
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I think the condensation energy would be even greater. To stay up, the water would have to be in vapour form. Obviously, to fall like rain, it must condense. One kilo condensing water releases 2260kJ.

Hans
 
HansMustermann said:
Actually, no, the KJV translation of Genesis 7:20 is just misleading.
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Something in the Bible is misleading? But it's the Word of God! I can't believe that God would mislead us... :boggled:

I mean, WTH, the waters rising 7m would be the most stupidly ineffective genocide ever. I mean, forget mountains, 7m doesn't even cover a moderate mound. And then you wouldn't even need a boat, you could just climb on a tall tree or on the roof.
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I agree that 7m isn't that impressive, but it's a much more realistic scenario don't you think? I think that if God was misleading us then He was probably exaggerating the depth and extent of the Flood. However I think it's more likely that some human got it wrong, probably Noah since he was the primary eye witnesses. Now I'm not saying that Noah was lying, just that the Flood may have looked bigger than it was.

I mean, wth, Noah's instructed to build a boat 30 cubits high, or about 14m. Allowing for even minimal elevation above sea level to start with, say, 1m or 2m, if the waters roes 7m, that thing wasn't even floating at that point, but still had the keel on the ground. Why not build a platform with a fraction of that wood, then?
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Noah was instructed to build an Ark (which means chest or cabinet) with rooms, three stories, a roof, and door in the side. What kind of boat has a door in the side? I conclude that the Ark was actually a house designed to float on water, ie. a houseboat. This type of craft usually has a flat bottom and a very shallow draft.

Here are the specs for a modern example, the Olympia 5 story floating hotel
Length: 96.35m (214 cubits)
Width: 30.25m (67 cubits)
Height: 24.95m (55 cubits)
Draft: 2.90m (6 cubits)

The Ark was only 60% of the size of the Olympia by volume, so it probably had a proportionally shallower draft.
 

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Roger Ramjets said:
Noah was instructed to build an Ark (which means chest or cabinet) with rooms, three stories, a roof, and door in the side. What kind of boat has a door in the side? I conclude that the Ark was actually a house designed to float on water, ie. a houseboat. This type of craft usually has a flat bottom and a very shallow draft.

Here's the specs for a modern example, the Olympia 5 story floating hotel
Length: 96.35m (214 cubits)
Width: 30.25m (67 cubits)
Height:[/b] 24.95m (55 cubits)
Draft: 2.90m (6 cubits)

The Ark was only 60% of the size of the Olympia by volume, so it probably had a proportionally shallower draft.
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Some believers have theorized that the ark was basically just a house. There is even a painting somewhere to that. However, it won't do: There is no way a flat wooden bottom could withstand such pressure, and floating like a box on water, waves would be crashing against the flat walls, soon knocking them in.

Hans
 
Roger Ramjets said:
Noah was instructed to build an Ark (which means chest or cabinet) with rooms, three stories, a roof, and door in the side. What kind of boat has a door in the side? I conclude that the Ark was actually a house designed to float on water, ie. a houseboat. This type of craft usually has a flat bottom and a very shallow draft.
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You forgot to mention a window. One window on a sealed 500' box. Thousands upon thousands of animals farting 24-7 with only one window to let the air out. An 8 hour road trip with the kids would be a cakewalk compared to this.
 
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