Wow, Blackadder, that was terrific debunking! Now, to put that into terms an American can understand, the ark would have needed to be .3 miles wide and 4 miles long. But the Bible says the ark was 300 cubits by 50 cubits, that would be slightly longer and more narrow than one American football field. According to your more accurate representation of how big the ark should have been, it would have needed to be 47 football fields long, at least.

The Bible writers got it so wrong, by miles, and miles...

LOL!

After doing a routine on the insanity of believing the Noah's Ark fantasy, comedian Joe Rogan is confronted by a believer discussing the "evidence":

Grace wrote:Wow, Blackadder, that was terrific debunking! Now, to put that into terms an American can understand, the ark would have needed to be .3 miles wide and 4 miles long. But the Bible says the ark was 300 cubits by 50 cubits, that would be slightly longer and more narrow than one American football field. According to your more accurate representation of how big the ark should have been, it would have needed to be 47 football fields long, at least.

The Bible writers got it so wrong, by miles, and miles...

LOL!

Actually, given that a typical cubit was approximately 52.5 cm, 300 cubits is approximately 157.5 metres, or 516 feet. 50 cubits would therefore be 86 feet. By comparison, a Ticonderoga Class guided missile warship is 567 feet in length, with a beam of 55 feet. Factoring in the draught, then the floating petting zoo, if ever it had been built, would have been approximately twice the size of the aforementioned warship - a little shorter, but considerably wider beam and deeper draught. Which would have sunk without trace even in calm waters, let alone the sort of tempestuous seas that would have been present if the fantasy "global flood" had ever taken place for real. Because, wait for it, wooden ships beyond 250 feet in length fail to be watertight. The Royal Navy found this out the hard way, when it constructed HMS Mersey and her sister ship, HMS Orlando (more on these two here).

The problem, as was explained to me by Elká back in the RDF days, centres upon the stresses that the hull experiences when riding over waves whose wavelength equals the length of the hull. When the wave crests are at the bow and stern, the midships is relatively unsupported in comparison, and experiences gravitational downforce stresses resulting in the hull flexing with a downward curve toward the relatively unsupported midships, a phenomenon known as 'sagging'. When the wave crest reaches midships, it's the turn of the bow and stern to be relatively unsupported, and the hull flexes in the opposite direction, a phenomenon known as 'hogging'.

Now, whilst wood exhibits good compressive stress resistance, its tensile stress resistance is more limited, and consequently, those tensile stress limits are exceeded if you build a wooden ship with a hull much longer than 250 feet. At this point, the ship starts to admit water, as the watertight seals between the planks separate. The biggest wooden ships for which proper documentary evidence exists, either suffered so much from water ingress as to be effectively useless after construction, or else required the constant operation of bilge pumps to keep them seaworthy. This is why modern large ships are built using steel alloys - steel alloys possess a much greater resistance to tensile stress, and can therefore be used to construct hulls that are as much as 458 metres (1,504 feet) in length (the longest vessel ever built was the Seawise Giant, also known in the past by other names, such as the Knock Nevis, an oil tanker that was broken up in 2010). The longest ships currently in operation are the seven Maersk Line container vessels, of which Emma Maersk is a prime example, and are almost 398 metres in length (1,304 feet).

Bear in mind that even the massive Maersk Line container vessels would be insufficient to carry all of the known world's species on a year-long "rescue voyage" - to do the job properly, you would need a vessel of outlandish size. Given the highly specialised ecological requirements of many species, you would have the problem of either [1] providing heating for the tropical species whilst sailing at polar latitudes, or [2] providing refrigeration for the polar species whilst sailing at tropical latitudes, and this would be a challenging exercise for a 21st century vessel, manned by hundreds of trained zoologists, and equipped with nuclear power. The idea that a Bronze Age wooden barge held together with nails, and crewed by a 600 year old drunk and his immediate family, would be up to the job is quite simply farcical.

What you would need, would not be so much a ship, more a synthetic floating land mass, and one that covered a considerable area to boot. You'd need to construct something that consisted, in essence, of a collection of man-made islands, all connected together in a manner allowing the entire structure to move with the wave motion (which in itself would be the mother of all seasick rides), and to give everything its own ecosystem, this structure would have to be the size of the Indian Subcontinent. Try navigating that across an ocean. Even then, some of the ecosystems would have to be enclosed, and provided with a battery of technological aids to life support. You'd have to provide a desert ecosystem for organisms such as certain species of Jerboa, rainforest ecosystems for Three Toed Sloths and similar organisms, a grassland/prairie ecosystem for Bison, and a polar ice cap environment for Polar Bears and Emperor Penguins. At leas then you wouldn't have to face the shit problem.

"Faith Floats".


So does shit.

Magnificent as always Cali, thank you.

You'll note that the tenth scale model actually has steel support posts in it.

wtargentina wrote:ehhh - Lions used to roam happily in Iran and are still to be found living wild in India

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_Lion

Not that I believe for a minute that this guy has found any cat hairs at all....

I wouldn't think it too much of a problem if he found hairs of different cat species on the boat. It's not like humans have never transported different species from one area to another via boat, it's just hardly convincing evidence for the ark.

Noah said it, I believe it, that settles it!

That goes for me too

Noah didn't say it, believers are deluded, and that doesn't settle anything.