ok, well. i get bored easily. so one night, i engaged in a bit of a debate over the bible, and how much truth the stories in it held. i decided to site this one, do a little research, and basically make a halfassed effort to show that it couldn't have happened the way it was told. i'm sure i'm not the first, but oh well. i had fun doing it. mind not the sort of.. erm. i guess sketchiness of this report, if you wish to call it that. anyway. here it is. NOAH'S ARK/FLOOD 450 ft long, 75 wide, 45 high - genesis 6:15 7 pairs of every living creature - genesis 6:19-20 "the world has so many animals that no one could possibly count them. no one even knows how many kinds of animals there are. so far, scientists have classified almost one million kinds of animals. but each year, hundreds of new kinds are discovered." - world book encyclopedia (what about protists? could be either plant or animal. did noah get a microscope and get seven pairs of protist?) Total Ark voyage: estimated 380 days. - genesis 8:3-14 over one million species in a 450/75/45 ark. food for one million species for all 380 days. excessive amount of weight. ark sinks. * 7 pairs of one million species of animals is 14 million animals. Feces, urine: the output of 14 million animals is pretty excessive. would add even more weight to the already unreal amount on board. all the animals output would fill the ark faster than the 8 people on board (genesis 7:13) could unload it. Noah and his family would have to work nonstop 24/7 to keep the ship, at the very most, partially unloaded. sooner or later, it would overcome them, and the ship would turn into a shitship, with animals and humans drowning in a cargo hold of feces and urine. Eating factors: herbivores (plant eating): even if enough grass and other plants could be gathered for a trip over a year long, plants would die in about 2 or 3 days after being uprooted. even if potted, watered, well kept, etc, which it would be very hard to keep plants with the fecal problem going on, they would not last the entire trip, or even half of it. carnivores (meat eating): well, obviously, meat rots if not kept cold, and after the meat spoils and/or supply runs out, carnivores go after herbivores or other carnivores. meaning if the herbivores food shortage didn't get them first, the carnivores would, after which the carnivores would begin to eat each other. conclusion on food: if the ark ever did get afloat and going and made the 380 trek, due to food situations, odds of anything surviving are next to nothing. Getting the animals gathered/on board: it is said in genesis that noah was told about the flood, by god, 120 years before it happened. giving him that long to gather up all 14 million animals he needs to get on board. which might conceivably be done, maybe, if he went at it nonstop. but imagine gathering up king cobras and living with them on an ark. kind of a dangerous concept. What about the fish in the sea? did they just stay in the sea, since it was, after all, a flood, and got excluded from the "every living animal" roll call? or did noah find aquariums somewhere along the way to keep all the little fishies in? and what about the matter of the blue whale? 14 blue whales would simply overwhelm the ark, since blue whales are the largest creatures on earth. Another matter is dinosaurs. Christians insist that the earth is only thousands of years old, rather than millions. putting us side by side with the dinosaurs, they say. aside from the matter of we would most likely have an accurate description of what happened to the dinosaurs if that were true (did we hunt them to extinction? or what?), the dinosaurs would add even more animals to the ark, and the meat eating dinosaurs aren't going to want steak for dinner, they'll want to hunt and kill, so kiss everything else on board goodbye, basically. it would be a very, very tight squeeze. an impossible squeeze. Now suppose that Noah did manage to squeeze every last animal in, since a guesstimate puts the total area of the ark around 34,000 ft. he might be able to pull that off, if he packed in every single inch with animals. but in that case, there aren't windows and air pockets everywhere, and about 90% of the animals would probably die from suffocation. Building the Ark: odds are that only noah andhis sons worked on the ark. so 4 men over a period of 120 years, assuming they'd begun work on the ark first instead of gathering the animals. it isn't mentioned that any of noah's sons, or even noah himself, had any previous carpentry experience. so it probably took awhile to figure out how to buld an ark that could not only hold 14 million animals within a 450 ft length, but not come apart at the seams at the same time. Survivors: now imagine if noah and his family actually survived the flood, animals aside. they are the only humans left on earth. and god orders them to procreate. well, noah has a wife, his sons all have wives, that's all find and dandy. but their kids aren't going to have anyone except the other kids to carry things on when it gets to be that time. so we've got some cousin/aunt/uncle/mom/dad loving going. incest to the core. not a pleasant thought, is it? the lord evidently didn't mind, or at least until leviticus 18:6-14, where he lays down the law about incest. incest is a big no no, says god in leviticus. That's right. God just contradicted himself. Conclusion: this whole flood/ark story is a crock. that's just this heathen's opinion. for all i know, maybe noah had a degree at harvard in mathematics and ark building and ways to cheat the long cherished laws of physics and had his handy dandy graphing calculator right there at his side, and his construction crew with their bulldozers and backhoes, and a fully functional lab with every species of animal already in captivity and ready to be put on an ark in the unlikely event that god got the notion to wipe out mankind with a flood. who knows. everything else seemed possible back then. too bad we can't do that crap now, along with living to be 600 years old or so, isn't it? --- cp.