Students Surprised to Find Noah's Ark Feasible

a reply to: IndependentOpinion

Easier say than done, when the prestigious Scientists at the University of Leicester master’s students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy build the ark to bible specifications and fill it with the 70 thousand animals and then float for 40 days then and only then they will prove their theory, for the time being is just speculation and that is not prof.

Meanwhile I will still be a skeptical.

a reply to: marg6043

Here is more reason to be skeptical.

40 Days is commonly said but scripture actually says it's much longer. 338 days longer.

Here is the verses and math breaking it down. Never mind the terrible page design. Link

a reply to: Lucid Lunacy

Thanks for that link I had no idea that it was more than 40 days, interesting that when the bible was written sciences and math were not what is today, so people would believe anything, after all if history doesn't fail me the bible in the beginning was only to be read by those with authority within the religious circles no for the common people.

a reply to: IndependentOpinion

They didn't bother to look into the feasibility of one man, or a couple assuming he had help, being able to build something so massive? Time/engineering/design skills? puuuuhhhlease. Ok, that was obnoxious, but please. Nothing about this is feasible.

originally posted by: IndependentOpinion
a reply to: AdmireTheDistance

Cheetah, puma, jaguar, leopard, lion, lynx, tiger, and domestic cats are all Feline.

Nowhere did anyone say that he took each of every sub-species.

Try naming all the 'kinds' in the world, like cat, dog, bird, rodent....., not cheetah, bulldog, parrot, hamster....

What do you mean by kind exactly? I'm unfamiliar with that taxonomic rank.

For instance you mention feline above then below you mention cat which is also a feline. How do you divide animals up into "kinds" exactly?

Sadly predictable that this would become a conversation about postulations over whether or not Noah existed, or if he repopulated the entire planet.

The point that is being missed, and that is being presented by the linked article, is that the math works. The tale of Noah wasn't just some goober making nonsense up sitting by the campfire. Or, if it was, that goober was an exceptional guesser.

It doesn't have anything to do with proving the veracity of the bible. It has everything to do with proving that whoever wrote this stuff was of a fine mathematical mind.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

ACTUALLY the article says that the ark would float with 70,000 animals on it. This despite there being millions of different species on the planet. It also doesn't explain how the ark would break apart due to its massive size in open waters. This study really doesn't prove anything.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

It doesn't have anything to do with proving the veracity of the bible. It has everything to do with proving that whoever wrote this stuff was of a fine mathematical mind.

The 'mathematical minds' belonged to the Sumerians and Akkadians, as this particular bible story was part of their lore before filtering down to the Hebrews via Abraham's lineage.

originally posted by: moebius
a reply to: IndependentOpinion

You shouldn't take it too serious. It is more a mental exercise than anything else. Take the some volume and calculate how much mass it will displace. Use the average mass of an animal to come up with some number of animals.

It is a variant of the spherical cow metaphor (reducing a problem to its simplest form):

Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it only works in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum".

Btw the practical limit on the length of a wooden-hulled ship is about 300 feet (90 meter), one of the reasons why we have switched to iron hullls at some point.

This. Given the parameters in the article, the 70,000 animals would have to have been compressed into the entire hull like sardines in a can with no walls, floors, food, water, or places for humans. It was simply an exercise of how much weight they could compress in the given volume and have the vessel still float. You would have had one huge meat paddy at the end.

OTOH, if one believes in a God who drowned the whole earth, he could have simply warped time and space to make them all fit in the ark so trying to calculate the carrying capacity of the vessel using physics and equations is moot.

Just say, 'cause magic and leave it at that.

Noah was not the only one to survive the flood. All over the world each culture holds a story of the great flooding which was most likely caused by volcanoes, tsunamis and the rapid melting of the ice age.

The flood is real its too bad peoples ignorance and hatred for anything religious will make them blind to the facts.

Also people taking the bible literally is just plain stupid.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Not really (see my spherical cows reply before). They've just fed some numbers into the buoyancy equation and got some numbers out.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Easy say than done, again, while mathematically they can say that an ark could had existed the prof is in building the ark today, fill it with the amount of animals that they say it would have housed, plus food and water and have it float for the amount of days given by the bible times.

Yes boats can be build hell that is why we got cruise liners for it they do float no doubt about it but can Noah's bible ark?, easy say than done.

I wonder why no ark has been build in modern times to prove the theory, or the story or whatever we can call it, sometimes is better to leave things as bible stories to the mind of the believer.

originally posted by: Shadow Herder
Noah was not the only one to survive the flood. All over the world each culture holds a story of the great flooding which was most likely caused by volcanoes, tsunamis and the rapid melting of the ice age.

No, that's not true at all. Not every culture has a flood myth. Yes flood myths are common, but they aren't native to all cultures.

The flood is real its too bad peoples ignorance and hatred for anything religious will make them blind to the facts.

Also people taking the bible literally is just plain stupid.

The flood was probably the story of a larger than normal flood in the Mesopotamian area. At the time, that was considered the whole world. Consider that the curvature of the earth would make it look like the whole earth was flooded if the flood was large enough.

a reply to: Shadow Herder

Yes every civilization have a flood and also a messiah, or a leader of some sort that could have been of divine birth, but only the bible has Noah's ark.

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

ACTUALLY the article says that the ark would float with 70,000 animals on it. This despite there being millions of different species on the planet. It also doesn't explain how the ark would break apart due to its massive size in open waters. This study really doesn't prove anything.

Other than man was able to create plans for a ship that could carry enormous amounts of weight at a fairly ancient time.

Seaworthiness isn't something from the last 3000 years. Its much more ancient than that.

Would you expect a story that is thousands of years old to depict an understanding of buoyancy that is well refined enough that it can theoretically build ships larger than the Greeks and Romans? I certainly didn't.

a reply to: Shadow Herder

Plenty of local floods have happened in which the floods would have appeared global.
But no evidence for a global flood exists.

a reply to: marg6043

Because the boats would break apart in open seas. It's a well known part of wooden ship building that if a boat is built to be too large that it will bow or flex in the middle and start leaking or break in half. All arks built to scale in modern times have a barge underneath them to prevent this from happening (therefore they aren't really floating).

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Exactly my friend, that is why I know that no one has tried to build an ark to "Noah's bible specification" to prove that it existed, like I say sometimes is better to leave bible stories to the interpretation of the mind of the believer.

Reality sucks.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Buoyancy is one thing, seaworthiness is a COMPLETELY different story. All the study proves is that the ark would float at dock.

Noah's Ark: Sea Trials

First this:

Would it have been possible to find enough material to build Noah's Ark? When another early supership was built, the Great Michael (completed in Scotland in 1511) it was said to have consumed "all the woods of Fife". Fife was a county in Scotland famous for its shipbuilding. The Great Michael's timber had to be purchased and imported not only from other parts of Scotland, but also from France, the Baltic Sea, and from a large number of cargo ships from Norway. Yet at 73 meters, she was only about half the length of Noah's Ark. Clearly a ship twice the length of the Great Michael, and larger in all other dimensions, would have required many times as much timber. It's never been clearly stated exactly where Noah's Ark is said to have been built, but it would have been somewhere in Mesopotamia, probably along either the Tigris or Euphrates rivers. This area is now Iraq, which has never been known for its abundance of shipbuilding timber.

Then this:

Allow me to explain. What's known as the square-cube law is pretty familiar: increase an object's dimensions, and its surface area increases by the square of the multiplier, and its weight increases by the cube of the multiplier. But one extension of this law is less familiar. When we scale up an object — take a wooden structural beam as an example — the strength of the beam does not increase as fast as its weight. Applied mechanics and material sciences give us all the tools we need to compute this. In summary, the tensile strength of a beam is a function of its moment and its section modulus. No need to go into the complicated details here — you can look up beam theory on Wikipedia if you want to learn the equations. Scale up a simple wooden beam large enough, the weight will exceed its strength, and it will break from its own weight alone. Scaled up to the immense size of Noah's Ark, a stout wooden box would be unspeakably fragile.

If there was even the gentlest of currents, sufficient pressure would be put on the hull to open its seams. Currents are not a complete, perfectly even flow. They consist of eddies and slow-moving turbulence. This puts uneven pressure on the hull, and Noah's Ark would bend with those eddies like a snake. Even if the water itself was perfectly still, wind would expose the flat-sided Ark's tremendous windage, exerting a shearing force that might well crumple it.

Whether a wooden ship the size of Noah's Ark could be made seaworthy is in grave doubt. At 137 meters (450 feet), Noah's Ark would be the largest wooden vessel ever confirmed to have been built. In recorded history, some dozen or so wooden ships have been constructed over 90 meters; few have been successful. Even so, these wooden ships had a great advantage over Noah's Ark: their curved hull shapes. Stress loads are distributed much more efficiently over three dimensionally curved surfaces than they are over flat surfaces. But even with this advantage, real-world large wooden ships have had severe problems. The sailing ships the 100 meter Wyoming (sunk in 1924) and 99 meter Santiago (sunk in 1918) were so large that they flexed in the water, opening up seams in the hull and leaking. The 102 meter British warships HMS Orlando and HMS Mersey had such bad structural problems that they were scrapped in 1871 and 1875 after only a few years in service. Most of the largest wooden ships were, like Noah's Ark, unpowered barges. Yet even those built in modern times, such as the 103 meter Pretoria in 1901, required substantial amounts of steel reinforcement; and even then needed steam-powered pumps to fight the constant flex-induced leaking.

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
a reply to: marg6043

Because the boats would break apart in open seas. It's a well known part of wooden ship building that if a boat is built to be too large that it will bow or flex in the middle and start leaking or break in half. All arks built to scale in modern times have a barge underneath them to prevent this from happening (therefore they aren't really floating).

This. There is a limit to the structural loading a wooden ship can withstand due to the limits of the materiel.

The largest wooden ship ever built was the Wyoming at 450 feet long:

The so-called ship-of-the-line had been the largest 18th-century warship. It carried maybe a hundred guns on three decks. It was massive and it bent with the waves, distorting its design shape. Slow and sluggish, those old sailing ships had been only half as long as the Wyoming.

America developed a new frigate design during the War of 1812 -- somewhat smaller than ships-of-the-line and braced internally to prevent bending. Those frigates finally gave us an edge against the vaunted British navy. They also heralded the innate weakness of large wooden ships -- their inability to hold one shape.

Wyoming's designers had likewise stiffened her with internal steel bracing, but she was too big. She still bent and twisted at sea. Gaps opened in her planking and let water in. Normally her pumps could handle the leakage, but the Pollock Rip storm was too much. She sank, taking thirteen sailors down with her.

www.uh.edu...

Even with steel bracing and steam engines dedicated to pumping out the water that flooded in when gaps opened up between the planks, the flexing and warping caused by the waves caused structural failure.