Noah, the Ark and the Flood.

I have lost track the amount of times I have had this discussion with people who wish to believe it.
I don’t doubt at some point in history there was a flood, a big flood, but not a world wide flood, and that some chap called Noah some how had the foresight to build a big boat and put some animal on board.
The story of Noah is mentioned in the Bible, Koran and Torah, so it must have some basis in fact.

The Ark

The Bible leads us to believe that one man and perhaps his three sons built a sea worthy vessel that could carry two (or in some passages of the bible, seven) of each species of animal and plant life on the planet.
There are millions of different species of animals on this planet alone and many many more millions of plants and Noah had to accommodate them all, if the story has to be believed.
Even some of the world’s biggest super tankers of present time could only hold a fraction of the world’s myriad of different animal species in conditions where they would be comfortable and safe.

Noah would not only have to build an Ark big enough to hold all the animals, but areas large enough to carry food and keep it fresh for ten months at the very least. Also much of the ark would be given over to supplies of fresh water (unless he some how managed to build a desalination unit that converted the sea water in to potable water.)
He then would have needed extra storage areas for the food they would need to sustain them after the flood for a year or two until natural vegetation began to grow back again (that’s assuming there would be any soil left for it to grow in).

So at the grand age of around 600 years old Noah had to build a super ship, the size and likes of which could not be built today with all our modern ship building methods, all out of locally sourced gopher wood. The upper deck of the ship would have been that high Noah would probably need breathing apparatus to walk on it.

The whole upper deck(s) would have to be given over to plant life and grasses, just to support a fraction of the grazing animal. None of the plants that Noah would have needed to take aboard would survive the minimum of Forty days journey (this is if the billions of plant species were all put aboard on the last day or two before the flood started) if they were kept below the deck levels away from sun light.

So if the bible is to be believed eight people, Noah his wife, their three sons and wives, cared for the specialised and demanding needs of countless millions of animals and hundreds of millions of insects as well as tending to thousands of acres of grass and plant life during the journey. Most zoos only have a tiny fraction of the possible array of animal species that Noah would have had, yet they employ hundreds of people to take care of them.

The physics behind the story of the ark is impossible. Not only would the collection and storage of the animals require all of Noah’s energies, he had to collect the plant life, grow specialised crops, build a ship of such proportions to house them all and then contend with being over 500 years old at the time.
He also only had seven days (Gen 7:4-10) to load all the millions of animals and plants onto the ark.
So if we take a very conservative guess and say there was 10 million different species of animal and plant to load (which I am sure you will agree is much much less than there would be), then he would need to load approximately 1,500,000 per day, or put another way, 1041 per minute or 17 per second.

The bible says that Noah had approximately 100 years to do all this and that in itself poses its own issues. If Noah spent the whole 100 years just building the ark, then surely the parts he built first would have started to rot away by the time he hammered in the final nails. This is not taking into account for such thing as termites and other wood devouring insects that would have risen thousands of generations amongst the timbers of the ark.
This also does not account for jealous locals stealing the wood for them selves or trying to sabotage the project.

Personally I believe there was a chap called Noah, who during a localised flood in and around the area of Modern day Turkey saves a significant amount of animals on a large boat. Like all great tales, the story became embellished with every telling and a handful of farm animal became a menagerie and then the whole spectrum of animal life upon the planet.



The Flood

According to the Bible during the flood every mountain was covered by water. So that is at least 8,848 metres (29,000 feet) of water encompassing the entire globe.
Now I am not a mathematician but that is something close to 4,500,000,000 cubic kilometres of water which is 15 times the volume of the sea and the ice caps combined.
Rainfall of that magnitude is akin to the amount of water pressure used in Hydraulic mining where water is used to break rocks.
We are talking in excess of 200 metres (90 feet) of water per day or around 8.5 (2.5 feet) metres an hour or 0.14 metres (4 inches) a minute. Recently we had rain in Britain that amounted to a couple of inches a day and it destroyed crops and brought life to a halt. We are talking of rainfall that would strip soil from land and churn the seas into mud.
Water cascading from the sky at that speed would completely flatten everything that it hit, including the Ark itself.
The earth would be stripped down to the rock of all soil and arable land. All fresh water would become tainted with salt water which would kill all aquatic life that relies of fresh bodies of water to survive. The seas would be a churning mass of mud and debris that would clog and suffocate anything that swam in it. Animals such as dolphins would soon die out as hunting fish with it sonar would become impossible because of the turmoil caused in the water by the 90 feet a day down fall. Whales would drown as they came up for air because their air holes would instantly fill with water the second it surfaced, that is if they survived the pressure of the down pour as it would probably prevent them from being able to reach the surface of the water anyway.

Then you have the dead. There would be tens of millions of dead people and animals floating and festering in the water around the ark spreading disease and illness once the rain stopped and they would have been an ever present threat for the next nine months attracting flies.

According to the bible in all this time Noah, his family and al the animals remained shut up in the ark, which God insisted only had one tiny window (Gen 6:16).
So millions of animals, billions of plants, no ventilation, no fresh food, no fresh water, no facilities for the treatment or disposal of manure and millions upon millions of dead people and animals floating about just outside.
Well now I put it like that I begin to wonder why I ever doubted it.

The story of the flood is, to me, a wash out.
See what I did there?


After the flood

So the waters have gone (who knows where?) and the ark has come to rest. The time has come for Noah to release the animals that gallop off the ark and start breeding like the clappers.
Just a couple of problems with this scenario though.

All the animals have been cooped up with out exercise for almost a year, so the gallop is would be more of a shaky crawl, or totter at the very best.

The majority of them would not have seen daylight in all that time, unless Noah rotated them so they could be near the window, and would be lacking in many essential vitamins.

They would not have had access to fresh water and food in all that time so their general health would be critical, that is assuming they would in reality survive at all.

So Noah’s first job would be the recuperation of his animals, and for this he would need fresh water and fresh food.
Oh dear.
No arable land in which to plant crops (that is if he had the foresight to bring along some seeds) and no potable water. All available land would have been stripped by the floods and anything deposited as the water receded would be full of salt deposits and unsuitable to the majority of all known crops. Any pools of water would be salt water and full of rotting decaying dead things.
So here is Noah with several million sickly animals and nothing to feed them with and nothing for them to drink.
The predators with in the animals would soon start to diminish the number of remaining animals as Noah and God seem to have neglected the basis of all food chains, some animals eat other animals faster than they can breed so lots of them are needed to sustain the animal above them in the chain.
The herbivores would have nothing to eat and very quickly the carnivores would run out of things to eat.
Anything else would most probably succumb to diseases or die of thirst.

The whole exercise would have been futile.


Odds and ends

Just supposing Noah landed safely and all the animal were well and there was underground springs bringing fresh water and acres and acres of crops and grass lands which had remained untouched and all the dead were washed away, and all the carnivores agreed to become vegetarians until there was enough years of reproduction to allow them to start meat eating again and everything else that needed to happen to allow the flood story to succeed actually did happen (this requires some amazing leaps of faith) there are still things that would make the flood story hard to believe.

How did all the animals return back to whence they came safely? Just having one pair of each animal species is extremely precarious at best, throwing arduous treks across the globe over land and sea (not sure if panda and kangaroos are that good as swimmers?) only make the chances of survival much less likely.

Inbreeding would begin to mutate all the species after a couple of generation rendering much of them sterile.

Again, we have inbreeding with in the remaining eight humans, of which only six were of breeding age (in biblical terms they were less than 400 years old), and who could they breed with?
Er..each other, and all the males were related so all offspring would be related and so once again, as with Adam and Eve, the population is based on inbreeding and incest.

I once more hear the twangs of the six fingered banjo emanating from the pages of the bible.

I am sure I will broach this topic again at some point, but for now, I believe that give my reason why I think the whole thing is utter drivel.