A nice thing about sheltering them in a wooden boat – you don’t need to take along additional food.
Just tell them to eat slowly – it has to last a while.
It’s not called “Noah’s Boat” for a reason. Although the word is hardly ever used any more other than for Noah’s Ark or the Ark of the Covenant, the English word “ark” means “box”. So we should assume that it’s mostly rectangular. Granted, there will be some wasted space, but we’re in the right order of magnitude. And a lot more space is going to be wasted by the fact that the animals aren’t all liquids which can be poured in.
You know, I’d actually put more credence into this sort of idea then I would into a literal “Noah’s Ark”. That is, I’d be more willing to believe that Noah was super-smart and had a collection of animal DNA to do a “Jurassic Park” type of repopulation, then I am of a 300 cubic ark holding millions of different species…
As people have already pointed out, if the bible is not true, there was no Noah, there is no God, etc, the question is flawed.
So – lets take the question at face value and assume there is a God, and he wrote and gave us the Torah, and the Torah is true.
Furthermore, instead of interpretting the Torah in a vaccum, lets assume that God passed information to Moses, who passed it down through generations, and that information, now called “the oral law” was written mostely-correctly by commentators.
Then:
The great 12th centuray commentator Rashi explains that an ark 10 times as large would not be big enough to hold all of the species. They were kept there by miracle.
Why then, did God need such a large ark? Why not a smaller one. Why did he need an ark at all.
He didn’t. He had Noah build the large ark, which took him 120 years to construct, so that people would ask him why he was building the ark, and would have a chance to repent. They didn’t repent.
> Personally, I’ve always wondered how he managed to collect the kangaroos.
God had the animals come to ark by themselves. Those animals that had relations with humans were not permitted on by God.
The rightous animals that were permitted on the ark did not eat each other. God sustained the animals (and Noah and his family). God caused the plants to survive the flood (perhaps as seeds?).
from http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/
6:14-15 Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. The largest wooden ships ever built were just over 300 feet, and they required diagonal iron strapping for support. Even so, they leaked so badly that they had to be pumped constantly. Are we to believe that Noah, with no shipbuilding knowledge and no shipbuilding tradition to rely upon, was able to construct a wooden ship that was longer than any that has been built since?
But not only was the ark too big to be seaworthy, it was far too small to be able to contain the earth’s millions of plant and animals species.
6:16 God tells Noah to make one small window (18 inches square) for ventilation.
7:8-9 Here Noah is explicitly told that both clean and unclean animals are to go into the ark in pairs. This is in direct contradiction with the instructions God gave Noah in 7:2-3.
Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Now this must have taken some time, along with expert knowledge of taxonomy, genetics, biogeography, and anatomy. How did Noah manage to collect the endemic species from the New World, Australia, Polynesia, and other remote regions entirely unknown to him? How, once he found them, did he transport them back to his Near Eastern home? How could he tell the male and female beetles (there are more than 500,000 species) apart? How did he know how to care for these new and unfamiliar animals? How did he find the space on the ark? How did he manage to find and care for the hundreds of thousands of parasitic species? How did Noah obtain and care for the hundreds of thousands of species of plants? (Plants are ignored in the Genesis account, but the animals wouldn’t last long after if the plants died in the flood.) No, wait, don’t tell me. A miracle happened. Millions of them.
7:11 God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains.
7:13-14 All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” Since there were several million species involved, they must have boarded at a rate of at least 100/second. How did poor Noah and his family make sure that the correct number of each species entered through the door and then get them all settled into their proper living quarters so efficiently? I wish the airline companies could do as well!
Ladies and Gentlemen, ahem.
The time has come to take stock of this thread.
It seems likely that the OP was intended as a semi-scholarly attempt to find out if the possibility of cramming all significant and respresentative earth-inhabited animals in a big box is remotely possible.
Never mind the problems of collecting, loading, preserving, supporting and eventually distributing the cargo. Just, “Could they physically fit?”
If they could, I assume that the Noah’s Ark story would be examined further for other strong & weak points. But, my friends, this would be similar to the question, “How many presents can Santa Claus distribute on Christmas Eve, given X chimneys, Y children and Z reindeer?”
Or, “How many Easter eggs could the Easter Bunny lay and distribute if the Easter bunny could lay eggs?”
Or, “How many teeth could the Tooth Fairy handle on a good night?”
Does this illustrate the absurdity of this exercise? We’re talking about a myth, folks! A fairy tale! A folk story! A tall tale! It’s in the Bible, fer chrissakes!!
I just want to know where you would put the whales.
Isn’t physics wonderful!
Whuckfisle, it’s calculations like that (“Santa needs to make 822.6 visits per second”) that made children’s author Maurice Dolbier conclude that Santa could use an assistant.
I refer you to a thoroughly charming book, Torten’s Christmas Secret.
(End of hijack.)
Unh…same place you put the fish and dolphins? In the aquarium! 
Cool! When and where can I go sit on the lap of and get my picture taken with one of Noah’s helpers?
Sorry, moriah, you used to be able to do that, but noah moah.
