When Literalists have to literally lie to sell their literal truth (AKA Adventures in Ark-itecture)

[funinspace]

One of my jobs in the Navy was to measure ship's flexure.

The submarine, made of HY80 steel, would dive beneath the waves and still twist a measurable amount just from the way water's forces struck different parts of the sub with different vectors. We had to measure the twisting to keep our missile accurate when we launched. The amount was small, but my point is that just floating in the ocean, it twisted.
Hell, we used to measure the flexure in the dry dock, then watch the ship twist just from being lifted when they sank the drydock to float the submarine.

This was over about 100 feet of 3/4 inch steel. The twisting on the ark would be much worse: 450 feet of wood. The weight distribution will be unequal, the forces at the surface that much greater, the timbers will twist like matchsticks. Even if individual frames and panels and planks might not snap like twisted matchsticks, the hull's watertight integrity will suffer as the planks part and water rushes in.



But aside from the salt-water-activated flotsam generator, there's other problems.
I once calculated the deck space of the ark to match 18 high school basketball courts. So imagine 18 religious high schools setting up an experiment. In each basketball court, set up cages to hold 100 sheep (someone told me that the average size of the animals on the Ark would be that of a sheep... As if that makes the three species of Elephants easier to deal with), and food for the sheep for one year.
Give them access to fresh water as necessary. Each day, allow each school to let 8 volunteers into the court to take care of the animals. Distribute food, remove waste, fix and repair cages, inspect animals for wounds or disease, etc. They have one hour. The next school cannot start their hour until the previous school finishes and evacuates the court.

This simulates Noah, three sons and their four wives working an 18 hour day to keep the arkanimals alive and healthy. See if they can manage it for a year.
To be more accurate, should probably demand that two people work some sort of bilge pump at all times during their hour, doing absolutely nothing but pumping leaks back over the side to keep the barge afloat.

Thank you Keith for explaining clear your professional findings. Despite my position to the Ark I will honestly find this interesting.

(Ok joedad you got me !)

FWIW, I have a stale Electrical Engineering degree from the 1980's, and it does take more than just a simplistic 'just build it bigger' to deal with the physical forces operating on such a scale. Maybe if you consider a paper airplane that you can make. I used to do that quite a bit as a kid, skinning fast moving ones, and floppy slow circling ones. However, just try to build a Yuuuge one that just doesn't fall like a paper blob. Anyway, here are some sites that talk at least generally about the issue of trying to engineer a wooden ship so big:

The Wyoming was a mostly wooden ship at the length of the purported Ark. It had a coal fueled steam engine. However, that was not for propulsion, but for the pumps to deal with the massive water leakage from the huge wooden hull even with steel bracing.
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2492.htm

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.

Ship builders have known since at least 1900 that 100 meters is near the practical limit nearly (notice that they still had steel/iron reinforcements) pure wooden ships:
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4279

llow 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.
<snip>
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.

Of course one can stick to the steady stream of magic cards to keep the fairy tale afloat...but this still requires a trickster god, willing to fake a reality that isn't there as the geological record screams 'no world covering deluge' loud and clear.

 

[Learner]

(Ok joedad you got me !)

All this religious behavior fascinates me. My intent was not to get you in some way but to actually point out what Dunning Kruger is. If you have read up on it you can appreciate how it operates, and the point I was trying to make vis a vis you and Keith when it comes to ship construction.

Fair enough

 

[Learner]

Pumping bilges? You mean buckets, Kieth: Pumps would not have existed in the time period we are talking about. Neither would have iron nails and fittings, trusses, clinker hulls, arches, or really any form of basic structural knowledge. This is the pyramid era of building. Post and lintel, ropes and pegs. Between the butt joints sealed with pitch (standard for the period) and the flexure, that barge would have leaked so much it would have been too much for all eight humans to lug buckets all the way up to the top to empty.

They could of had tread mills built in driven by certain animals, systems for elevator contraptions not to far off from a water mill of buckets, lifting animal waste or other things , conserving some waste for fuel ,fertilizer for indoor plants. Several large bellows connected and used for pumping systems driven again by the animals. Which is a lot of potential muscle power ! Various useful methods yet so simple like the acadimedian screw.

(Will have to get back on later).

 

[Sarpedon]

No, they couldn't have, as these things were not invented yet. Copper age technology.

The archimedian screw was named after Archimedes, who lived THOUSANDS of years after this flood allegedly happened. Even though it probably existed earlier, there is no reason to think that it would have been available to people who hadn't mastered iron or bronze.

Also, as anyone who actually knows anything about pumps knows that archimedian screws have a limited height from intake to discharge. How tall is this ark again?

You are suggesting technologies that as anachronistic as would be suggesting that Jesus's disciples got in their cars and drove from Jerusalem to Gallilee after the crucifixion.

They built the pyramids with nothing but ropes, ramps, levers, wedges and chisels. No pulleys, no wheels, no pumps, just simple tools and huge amounts of labor. There is no way 8 people could have done anything like this in an era devoid of labor saving devices.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I'm a machinist by trade and work in shop that basically designs and builds machines that then go on to produce a final product. People come to me regularly asking if we can make this or that. Once someone asked me if I could duplicate an old key that had a hollow tip. Another person asked me if I could make him a gear. Another asked me to repair his guitar. Still another asked me if we could build him a rear end for his car.

Of course we can build all those things but it would be very expensive, not something you do by flipping a few switches like on Star Trek. The key would have taken me at least 20 hours. Do I want to sit and make a key for someone that would take 20 hours of my life? That's a lot of cost and machine time.

I think it's easy to get duped by watching too much TV where things just happen - the magic of Hollywood. The bible works the same way.

 

[Sarpedon]

Yeah, there's a definite lack of knowledge about how things go from point a to point b. This fellow doesn't understand ships, so he likens them to buildings. But it turns out he doesn't know much about buildings. Also, he doesn't know about technology. He puts everything in the mental box of 'old technology' that is before what he is used to today. He doesn't understand that the Archimedian Screw is as far removed from the Flood as it is from the Steam Engine. There has been less time between Cleopatra and today than Cleopatra and Khufu. But he has both of them in his mental box labelled "Ancient Egypt."

 

[Learner]

Yeah, there's a definite lack of knowledge about how things go from point a to point b. This fellow doesn't understand ships, so he likens them to buildings. But it turns out he doesn't know much about buildings. Also, he doesn't know about technology. He puts everything in the mental box of 'old technology' that is before what he is used to today. He doesn't understand that the Archimedian Screw is as far removed from the Flood as it is from the Steam Engine. There has been less time between Cleopatra and today than Cleopatra and Khufu. But he has both of them in his mental box labelled "Ancient Egypt."

Don't worry about it Sarpedon, I was just engaging in discussion. Rightly or wrongly matched to your level sense, I was just pondering on a thought.

The Archimedian screw is a simplistic design and very useful an example is all I meant to say. If you need to rely on it that I'm out of my depth then by all means .

 

[Learner]

Also, as anyone who actually knows anything about pumps knows that archimedian screws have a limited height from intake to discharge. How tall is this ark again?

.

This is not what I'm suggesting happend but 'you didn't even put into account that you could have serveral smaller archemedian screws in water basins on each level '. This was believed achieved in Babylon raising water from lower the city to the gardens.

 

[Sarpedon]

Yes, I read the same wiki article. They are believed to have been so used by the same people who believe that there were such a thing as the 'Hanging Gardens.'

If you put enough of them in a series, you can indeed lift water high. But space in the ark is limited, isn't it?

 

[skepticalbip]

I don't understand the attempt to make the ark reasonable with respect to the way we know the world actually works. The whole Noah story requires so many miracles (events contrary to nature) to even be self consistent that one more miracle should be no giant leap. Just saying that the gopher wood and pitch were magic which made the ark indestructible and impervious to water should be sufficient. I have never seen anyone try to explain how Ali Baba's genie could fit into the lamp in terms that actually make sense in the real world.

 

[Lion IRC]

All this religious behavior fascinates me. My intent was not to get you in some way but to actually point out what Dunning Kruger is. If you have read up on it you can appreciate how it operates, and the point I was trying to make vis a vis you and Keith when it comes to ship construction.

Fair enough

No, it's not really 'fair' enough.

Accusing your interlocutor of a Dunning Kruger effect is the equivalent of calling them a dummy poo poo head.

...you're too dumb to know how dumb you are.
...surely you can't possibly believe THAT
...hey everybody, check out the Dunning Kruger guy lololol

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I don't understand the attempt to make the ark reasonable with respect to the way we know the world actually works. The whole Noah story requires so many miracles (events contrary to nature) to even be self consistent that just saying that the gopher wood and pitch were magic which made the ark indestructible and impervious to water should be sufficient. I have never seen anyone try to explain how Ali Baba's genie could fit into the lamp in terms that actually make sense in the real world.

Well, if people today believed in Ali Baba's genie, they'd be doing just that. The reason for that is because people respect science and they want to give their own little pet notions the respectability of being scientifically accurate. The problem is that they're trying to do this without putting these notions through all the rigors which have made scientific inquiry respectable and accurate. That's why they try to add some "sciency" sounding stuff when talking about it and then hope that nobody looks too closely or hope that those who do look too closely don't talk so loud that they distract all the other people who are handing them money to see their "scientifically accurate" notions.

Many thinking Christians want to resolve the discrepancies between their faith and the real world and are more than willing to latch onto any thread, no matter how thin, that lets them say that they're doing this.

 

[Lion IRC]

No, they couldn't have, as these things were not invented yet. Copper age technology.

The archimedian screw was named after Archimedes, who lived THOUSANDS of years after this flood allegedly happened. Even though it probably existed earlier, there is no reason to think that it would have been available to people who hadn't mastered iron or bronze...

The Flood event would have reset the clock on human knowledge and technical know how. A lot of existing information would have been destroyed. Imagine if every book and every bit of digital information disappeared in a global cataclysm. And all bar 8 people were anihilated. How long do you think it would take before the next Leonardo Davinci or Thomas Edison came along?

In any case, I don't know why bilge pumps would be an issue. A bigger boat would also have greater buoyancy and there's no certainty that it would increasingly leak in proportion to its increased size. Why should we believe that 10 X the size equals 10 X the leakage?

Noah had plenty of time (and help from God) to build a leak free boat - or at the very least a boat which was sufficiently leak resistant to stay afloat long enough. That's not to say the boat wasn't close to capsizing/sinking by the time it hit dry land. By the end of the Flood they may have been praying to God that their boat would make it.

 

[blastula]

If you're going to use all powerful magic, then there's no need for an ark at all or Noah.

 

[Learner]

No, it's not really 'fair' enough.

Why dat ...


Lol .. no probs Lion I did have to look it up though.

 

[Learner]

Yes, I read the same wiki article. They are believed to have been so used by the same people who believe that there were such a thing as the 'Hanging Gardens.'

If you put enough of them in a series, you can indeed lift water high. But space in the ark is limited, isn't it?

Rather than putting them in a series you put them in a zig zag like a flight of stairs changing direction each level. Anyway we can agree this was not the case.

 

[Learner]

The Flood event would have reset the clock on human knowledge and technical know how. A lot of existing information would have been destroyed. Imagine if every book and every bit of digital information disappeared in a global cataclysm. And all bar 8 people were anihilated. How long do you think it would take before the next Leonardo Davinci or Thomas Edison came along?

In any case, I don't know why bilge pumps would be an issue. A bigger boat would also have greater buoyancy and there's no certainty that it would increasingly leak in proportion to its increased size. Why should we believe that 10 X the size equals 10 X the leakage?

Noah had plenty of time (and help from God) to build a leak free boat - or at the very least a boat which was sufficiently leak resistant to stay afloat long enough. That's not to say the boat wasn't close to capsizing/sinking by the time it hit dry land. By the end of the Flood they may have been praying to God that their boat would make it.

What he says .

 

[Learner]

If you're going to use all powerful magic, then there's no need for an ark at all or Noah.

The flood being the powerful magic ,perhaps Noah was there for the ride/to witness it all so to speak, thats why we know of it now.

 

[blastula]

I mean how it says they survived it. The collection of all the animals and a wooden ark to carry them can only be due to magic.

 

[Learner]

I mean how it says they survived it. The collection of all the animals and a wooden ark to carry them can only be due to magic.

Ah ok, Christians believe its due to God. As we say he created all things including the physics of the universe.This would then be easy for the Ultimate Designer to give Noah the blueprints of an Ark that would withstand rough seas.