Would Noah's Ark be seaworthy?

And a helicopter, cranes, whatever it took.

The maximum possible weight for an ark-sized boat, assuming 18 inch cubits and fresh water, is about 43,000 tons. Even allowing for empty weight and wanting to float a bit higher than right at water level, 17,000 tons doesn’t sound absurd.

To achieve the former, you need a decent measure of the latter.

Think he could’ve just asked God for an Aircraft carrier.

takes another look at the photograph

… Wait a minute… That’s not an ark… Look at those louvres, that’s a time machine! Think Noah got that beast up to 88 cubits an hour?

Of course it’s like fanwanking. Not unlike deliberating if the Millennium Falcon (of which we have more stringent design plant on compared to Noah’s ark), could really make the Kessel run in under 9 parsecs, despite the fact a parsec is a measure of distance.

Example fanwank: Well, perhaps the Kessel Run is an infamous smuggling run, from point A to Point B. That course is determined by your strategy of which routes, the inherent dangers of choosing which route(s) as the shortcuts found are usually the most heavily guarded, too remote if something goes wrong, or impassable by circumstance, like a nebula or something.

Then again, they asked him if the ship was fast, not if he was cunning. But he was both and the Empire was defeated.

…And then God invented the rainbow, and Lucas didn’t know what the fuck a parsec was.

But you olso need a propellant like oarsmen, sails or an engine, none of which the biblical ark apparently had.

Speed? It wasn’t going anywhere and it had all the time in he world to get there.

That’s my point! The dimensions given in the Bible make it a stupid design for an unpowered ark.

Yeah, and if God is all-powerful, what does he need a wooden boat for? Why can’t he just snap his fingers and make it all happen instantly? What’s with this 40 days & 40 nights shit? What does he need Noah for? If he created the world once, what’s so dammed difficult about a little redecorating?

Um, the biggest flaw in the Noah’s story was the need of an omniscient and omnipotent god to hit the reset button all together.

“Hang on, God; rather than killing everybody, why don’t you just make it rain for 40 days and 40 nights and wait for the sewers to back up?”

Well it’s **all **patently ridiculous. Unless you answer every single logical inconsistency and impossibility with “Oh God took care of that” magic then it’s utterly indefensible.

  1. Noah’s family doesn’t provide a stable enough gene pool for humanity to exist.

  2. An elderly gentleman does not have the capability of taming two of every creature on earth and leading them thousands of miles toward the ark. Especially given there were continents across oceans that were inaccessible to him.

  3. Two of every creature doesn’t provide a stable enough gene pool for those species to continue to exist. Hint: even if they were all potent and fertile, their offspring would all be inbred and the problem would only get worse.

  4. Two of every creature haven’t even been discovered by MODERN biologists. New and previously undiscovered species exist everywhere. How many varieties of toad on how many continents would he have had to collect?

  5. After the flood, since all the animals not on the Ark were wiped out, how did the Americas become populated with animals again? There was no land bridge between Asia and America at that time.

  6. The distribution of species on earth, isolated from one another by oceans, could not have ended up distributed the way they did if all species except the ones on a boat that ended up in the middle east died. There’s a reason Darwin’s voyage was so interesting, because certain islands had clearly isolated populations of flora and fauna, which would not have developed such distinct differences from mainland creatures in just a few thousand years.

  7. Opponents of evolution are often believers in this Noah’s Ark nonsense. Well to give them a big hint: Evolution would have had to occur at a rate a hundred thousand times faster than it actually does in the real world for the Noah’s Ark story to be even remotely plausible. Otherwise you wouldn’t have so many different types of beetles, okay?

  8. Explain why the plants and animals of all the distinct continents look like they’ve been evolving in isolation for millions of years, not having a common mediterranean source of approximately 4000-5000 years ago

  9. Without evolution, the amount of species on the ark, in terms of sheer mass alone, would sink the ship and overflow out of it.

  10. Food. Shit. Piss. Animals eating each other. Disease. Natural death. Accidental death. A handful of people trying to keep elephants, tigers, lions, polar bears, penguins (that must have taken a while) alive, not diseased, and uninjured. There’s no way you fit the sheer mass of organisms inside a boat of that size. The humans on board will spend 24 hours a day hauling tons and tons of feces and piss up to the top deck to pour it overboard. Good luck going inside the Lion’s cage to collect his shit chunks. Where do you store the food? How do you feed a hundred thousand pairs of animals? Do you keep them in separate cages? A cage for each of the different varieties of toad? Flightless birds? Wild cats? Wild dogs? Freshwater FISH?
    It’s all lies, utterly ridiculous and indefensible lies!

And if there WAS A GOD, who is OMNIPOTENT AND OMNISCIENT, he wouldn’t need to perform this ridiculous exercise, he could snap his fingers like Q and make it happen sans flood, and sans ark.

That the most brilliant of all beings ever conceived by man would have the imagination of a bronze age idiot, proves that this crap was written by a bronze age idiot.

It’s right up there with slavery being okay, women being property to be traded by their fathers, and making bets with Satan that people will still worship God even if he’s a total dick.

The writing in that book is *so *sloppy, the only explanation for the fact that anyone believes it is literally true is that they have no scientific curiosity, no ability to think critically, and no desire to question something they’ve been instructed not to question, just take it on faith. It’s as ridiculous as Scientology, and when I see Christians making fun of Mormons for their wacky beliefs, I am stunned by the lack of self-awareness.

The Noah Story has a lot more holes in it than the* wooden boat.* It was sunk long before it ever became seaworthy.

How many flights of stairs would Noah have to climb, every single day, just to haul buckets of animal piss off the ark? How many tonnes of shit would he have to personally move, every day? Or do we just let the air become unbreathable with fumes, toxic gas, and the rancid stench?

Pack 100 chickens in a suitcase for 2 months and see how many of them survive without human intervention.

Now imagine the suitcase doesn’t contain 100 chickens, but 2 of every chicken-sized animal on earth. Many of which eat one another.

Now keep every couple alive and well, and make sure they can breed and cover the earth when they’re done, even though the genetics suggest you’ll have nothing but retard babies who are riddled with genetic defects and are sterile.

Couple that with the grand question: If Eve has nothing but sons, who do they fuck? Cain wanders off and marries a baboon? What? Ask your priest.

What made you think Eve had nothing but sons?

…sooooo, anyway, about this ark,

Do you think the captains bunk had cotton bedsheets or linen ones?

The New Yorker had an article just a couple of weeks ago on a replica ark that was built in New York for making a film about Noah.

The set designer made the point that was made in this thread - an ark that doesn’t need to go anywhere doesn’t need a keel, and doesn’t really need to look like a boat at all - it can just look like a big shack.

“How long can you tread water?”

Seriously? We’re taking about a wooden ship with a deadweight tonnage (cargo capacity) almost three and a half times outside known experience, and you don’t see a problem? There are fields where order of magnitude estimates are useful, but shipbuilding is not one of them.

Yes, you could probably build a wooden structure of those dimensions, load it that heavily, and expect it to float - on a flat sea. The issue is whether it could survive the stresses of any significant wave action. The answer to that is, very probably not.

Very large wooden ships, such as the Wyoming, suffered badly from hogging and sagging. In the case of the Wyoming, water would leak through the hull as the planks twisted, which had to be pumped out. And this is a ship reinforced with iron struts every 3 feet or so. Bear in mind, any flooding compounds the problem, as the stresses increase.

The study I debunked ignores these problems. The stability analysis itself may be perfectly sound, but is useless if the basic figures are not realistic.

Nobody has mentioned the problems with the rain.

To cover all the land with water, the rate of rainfall must have been tremendous. way heavier rainfall than any wooden boat structure could endure. Heck, i doubt that a modern aircraft carrier could withstand that rate of rainfall.

I thought the water came from under the earth as well.

Flatulent Elephants?