The Creation Museum evolves

[PainRack]

Technically, the Zhang He ships might had similar dimensions to the Ark , but they face the same problems with units measurement that the cubit had. Archaelogical evidence suggests that the ships were smaller at 450 feet though, and had iron reinforcements on the larger ships.


The problem is with the floating "barge" of Noah Ark. Its stable, hard to roll over, but a barge doesn't survive ocean environments well. Much less the tempest.

[Sea Skimmer]

Some evidence also suggests the large flagship was actually just a river vessel used for the sendoff of the fleet and never actually left local Chinese rivers.

A sea anchor would help a barge keep its nose into the wind and waves, within limits but the the number one problem is just having a rigid enough hull to even get that far.

[PeZook]

You know, I sometimes ponder if Noah could have even gotten enough materials together to build it. It's not like Palestine had a thriving shipbuilding industry back then...

[LaCroix]

You also might notice that the ships built before the 18th century usually are well below 250ft. (Except for Caligula's 300ft barge, but that thing was not built for open sea...)

Also, Noha would not be able to use seasoned wood, but 'green' (for whatever that means in palestine ) one.

HMS Victory is a third of that size, and almost as wide, taking it as a baseline the ark should weight about 10000 tons (a ship that size needs a hull built like a warship, simply to not break apart.) Using cedar for planking would be a wise choice, there also is an oak species in Palestine, rather short, but should be usable for the framing. Cedar trees are like 1 ton a full tree, oak weights twice as much.

This small thought experiment leaves us with an estimate of 5-10 thousand trees, assuming 100% conversion.
Quick lookup shows that you can assume 3-500 trees per acre for a timber-harvest forest (~9ft spacing), so if there were a convenient forest nearby, you'd end up with 10-20 acres you'd need to cut, transport and work into shape.

[PeZook]

Don't forget all the hand-made nails Noah would have to procure, and the expertise he'd need (though of course God could provide that if we make enough crazy assumptions )

[LaCroix]

Don't forget all the hand-made nails Noah would have to procure, and the expertise he'd need (though of course God could provide that if we make enough crazy assumptions )

Ships are usually held together by wooden dowels in drilled holes. You split the tip of the dowel (the one which goes in first) and insert a wedge - drive it home and it will stay in there. They are usually made from the branches of the trees you need to cut, anyway.

The more daunting part is the need to cast new bronze tools for cutting/shaping the wood, which means he'd either need to buy the copper/tin anywhere, or mine it. Then the number of barrels/sacks for food storage, the harvesting of said food, etc,etc...

This with only four men and four women as workforce.

[madd0ct0r]

or we could cheat and have it as multiple barges lashed loosely together...

but that's not what it says in the bible!

[PeZook]

or we could cheat and have it as multiple barges lashed loosely together...

but that's not what it says in the bible!

Manpower again. Noah only had his family aboard, and multiple barges would require a proportionally larger crew to man.

[Spoonist]

You know, I sometimes ponder if Noah could have even gotten enough materials together to build it. It's not like Palestine had a thriving shipbuilding industry back then...

Uhm??
Isn't this the Phonecians and Caanites?
Weren't they like "world" fameous for their shipbuilding and vast trade?

[Simon_Jester]

You know, I sometimes ponder if Noah could have even gotten enough materials together to build it. It's not like Palestine had a thriving shipbuilding industry back then...

If we accept the basic premise, it's hard to say anything about the people, industries, and forests (or lack thereof) that were there before the Flood. Whatever giant forests happened to grow in the Middle East would have gotten killed off by salt water or torrential flows of water, and all that moving water would probably change the lay of the land too.

This with only four men and four women as workforce.

Hired hands? Slaves?

Of course, then you have to ask why he didn't take them along. But I never said Noah wasn't a jerk.

[PeZook]

Uhm??
Isn't this the Phonecians and Caanites?
Weren't they like "world" fameous for their shipbuilding and vast trade?

Noah's story doesn't say precisely where ; But the phoenicians only took to the seas in decidedly POST-biblical times, at around 1200 BC, as far as we can tell.

[LaCroix]

They were, from from 1550 BC to 300 BC.

Still, here you can see their method of fastening planks:
http://www.phoenician.org/ancient_ships.htm

This is a very painstakingly slow process, only to be done by skilled carpenters. I doubt Noah and his sons would have managed... The ark would have leaked like a sieve.

[Spoonist]

Noah's story doesn't say precisely where ; But the phoenicians only took to the seas in decidedly POST-biblical times, at around 1200 BC, as far as we can tell.

When would we place the time of noah then? I thought we had the literal approach so I assumed a YEC view, and at which point wasn't the levant known for ships and trade? (Relative to their contemporaries?)

[LaCroix]

Noah's story doesn't say precisely where ; But the phoenicians only took to the seas in decidedly POST-biblical times, at around 1200 BC, as far as we can tell.

When would we place the time of noah then? I thought we had the literal approach so I assumed a YEC view, and at which point wasn't the levant known for ships and trade? (Relative to their contemporaries?)

According to the bible, it was in the year 1656 after origin that Noah stepped into the ark... He was 600 at this point.

[Spoonist]

So if we take Isaac Newton's calculations of 4000BC then that would be 2344 BC, which means proto-caanites.

[Simon_Jester]

According to the bible, it was in the year 1656 after origin that Noah stepped into the ark... He was 600 at this point.

No wonder he could build it; he'd had all the time in the world to work on it!

Or three-eighths of it, anyway.

[LaCroix]

According to the bible, it was in the year 1656 after origin that Noah stepped into the ark... He was 600 at this point.

No wonder he could build it; he'd had all the time in the world to work on it!

Or three-eighths of it, anyway.

Well, i don't exactly know how long he had for the build, as there is no real time limit set in genesis 6, as far as I remember, but I do know that he had sired his three sons at the age of 500, and god referred to the sons, as well, in his building order, so it was less than 100 years construction time.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

According to the bible, it was in the year 1656 after origin that Noah stepped into the ark... He was 600 at this point.

No wonder he could build it; he'd had all the time in the world to work on it!

Or three-eighths of it, anyway.

Well, i don't exactly know how long he had for the build, as there is no real time limit set in genesis 6, as far as I remember, but I do know that he had sired his three sons at the age of 500, and god referred to the sons, as well, in his building order, so it was less than 100 years construction time.

With a hundred years to work with, makes you wonder what ancient shipbuilding methods would have been used to keep the wood in the oldest parts of the boat from rotting

[Sea Skimmer]

Wooden buildings and ships hundreds of years old exist you know, for that matter a damn lot of really old stone buildings and bridges of the world are held up by wooding pilings more then a thousand years old in some cases. Wood doesn't rot from age, it rots from persistant exposure to water and oxygen. Oiling and occasionally scrubbing the exposed wood would work fine to prevent rot for a century, provided the climate was wet enough for it to even matter. A much more serious problem would be avoiding setting the damn thing on fire by accident during such a long construction period as the wood would get absurdly dry and this was just always a major risk in shipbuilding and operating. Heck, it is even on metal ships.

[LaCroix]

Just thinking about caulking that beast of a boat with only 8 people makes my hands ache and my ears ring...

[PainRack]

You know, I sometimes ponder if Noah could have even gotten enough materials together to build it. It's not like Palestine had a thriving shipbuilding industry back then...

magazine article

In 2003, a doctoral candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Jose Solis, created a proposal to build the Ark for Noah based on sound naval architecture. He proposed a dead weight — the weight of the wooden structure alone minus cargo and ballast — as 3,676 tons. Fully loaded, it would have displaced 13,000 tons, as compared to the Great Michael's 1,000 that consumed "all the wood of Fife". Where would all that wood have come from? In his proposal, Solis simply skipped this detail, and assumed the wood was commercially available at a cost of $16,472,040 in 2003 dollars. Tens of thousands of massive timber-quality trees would have to have been imported into the middle of what's now Iraq. Did Noah have the resources to import from France, Norway, or anywhere else?

http://www.whistle.gatech.edu/archives/ ... /ark.shtml

Doctoral student weighs the cost, structure of a famous ship



Tyler Burns
College of Architecture

Jose F. Solis, a doctoral candidate in the College of Architecture, novice shipbuilder and designer, pondered this question: Will it float or not? His assignment as part of his qualifying written final exam was to build a model of Noah’s ark.

This meant producing the necessary elements, including drawings, dimensions, assumptions, specifications for materials, a construction contract for work, an estimate and a final bid price. A wooden ship of this size that met all physical laws was uncharted territory, yet his allotted time was forty hours.

On orders from advisor Linda Thomas-Mobley, Solis was to package these documents for a theoretical presentation to Noah, explaining why he should choose Solis’ company for the job of building the ark.

Solis’ task was to determine whether or not a ship of this magnitude was capable of floating and how that ship would be designed. The only way it would succeed, according to Solis, was if both internal and external pressures and forces were counter-balanced with trusses.

To create a three-story vessel with trusses, Solis calculated both the dead and live weight of the ship. He researched the types of materials that were available worldwide during Noah’s time and made an initial dead weight calculation of 3,676 tons. He calculated the live load of all the animals, food and storage, along with the residential portion of the ark, to be 4,560 tons, which was based on his assumption of the length of time Noah and the animals would be on the ark. The total load of both the dead and live weight was estimated to be 9,000 tons.

Solis then calculated the maximum and minimum amounts of water needed on the ark, designing a drainage system that used rainwater to fill up troughs and tanks scattered throughout the ark. His research concluded the total weight of the water, in addition to the containers, was 4,000 tons.

A challege of biblical proportions, Jose Solis was charged with selling Noah on a workable design for rescuing animals from a great flood. Above, a model of the ark.


The total displacement of the ark was 13,000 tons, which resulted in having the water line at 12 feet and thus capable of floating. Solis calculated a total displacement of 18,088 tons as the maximum worst case scenario and concluded that the point at which the ark would float would be 15.3 feet, 2.7 feet below his calculated sink or float mark of 18 feet.

After verifying that the ark would indeed float, Solis set out to design and estimate the amount of materials needed to construct the ark. His design placed the ark at 99,150 square feet. Solis went to a local hardware store and figured the cost of today’s wood and equivalent items needed to build the ark. His estimate for the total cost of the ark in today’s dollar was $165 per square foot, or $16,472,040.

Solis then spent thirty-five straight hours constructing a model that represented his findings. Once the model was done, the appearance differed from those drawings seen in books. “I was interested in how he didn’t take into consideration what people thought the ark looked like,” said Thomas-Mobley. “He took his background and designed an ark that would work, not something you would see out of a children’s book.”

Solis’ rendition of Noah’s ark looked more like a barge than the typical vision most people have of the ark. According to Solis, it could not have been done any other way with the technologies and materials available during that era.

“It was beautiful to see the finished product,” Solis said. “I have done what no one else has done. I have discovered throughout this process that there is no other way the ark could have been constructed without it sinking.” Based on Solis’ findings, Noah would probably agree.

16 million 2003 dollars.......

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Makes you wonder what the price of timber was at the time. One thing missing from the models is any type of sails, with that in mind, all the thing's going to do is drift.

[Simon_Jester]

That's even part of the story- the Ark wasn't designed to sail anywhere, and I don't think it's ever been commonly portrayed as having sailed anywhere. It was supposed to float in floodwater and ultimately run aground when the waters subsided.

[PeZook]

That's even part of the story- the Ark wasn't designed to sail anywhere, and I don't think it's ever been commonly portrayed as having sailed anywhere. It was supposed to float in floodwater and ultimately run aground when the waters subsided.

If God wasn't Noah's navigator (the Ark should've had a bumper sticker like that) one would have to wonder what he'd do if the waters subsided, and he found himself stranded in the Bay of Biscay

[Ahriman238]

My confessedly limited understanding of how theologians organize canon is that Abraham, the first Jew and worshiper of the true God, was a Babylonian merchant and all biblical history predating Abraham is either Babylonian myth or heavily based in it, revisionist versions of the story with one God instead of a pantheon. Opinions do differ, but I believe this is widely accepted.

I confess, my knowledge of Babylonian mythology is: Gilgamesh and Enki. I think there was a god called Marduk and another called Tiamat, but I'm not 100%.

There was a ruckus about eight years ago where it was theorized that the Black Sea used to solid ground until a plug of rock in the Aegean broke and the place flooded. This was believed to be the source of the Flood myth, that a whole nation was drowned and, as far as anyone knew, all the world with it. I don't know what all came of that.