When it comes to basic stability, it doesnât get simpler than these written plans from 4,500 years ago?
Best thing is the guy built a boat that had enough room for 8 people, all the animals of the earth and provisions to last the people and the animals until the water receded AND those 8 people managed to repopulate the earth in about 4300 years. Assuming 4 men and 4 women they and their offspring were very fertile. 
and you can visit it and see how it was done for only $125 !!
And the straights, deepest and fastest oil & gas wells drilled in the North Sea has been drilled at âDickensâ in Stavanger.
Any stability problems to report on this Ark?
only on the visitors - Many are bottom heavy, others quite stiff. Though none have any navigational issues - they are 100% sure where they are going.
Thatâs about as weird as this National Geographic documentary saying the whole human race has one single ancestor from 20,000 years ago? Those 20k years is using our modern calendar, not a 10 month calendar or flat Earth calendar like many ancient people used.
My linked article in comment 2 was an interesting read imo. While I used the words âbasicâ & âsimpleâ, thereâs nothing basic in the article after the first few paragraphs. Not being a big stability guy myself, the study on those plans from 4,500 years ago gets complex & comprehensive fast. They even took the time to build several miniature replicas to test.
What amazes me about it is, who was thinking or planning on stability & ship building of that size that long ago? The largest ship of ancient time was the Syrausia designed by Archimedes around 240BC. She was colossal at 55m long, 14m wide & 13m tall. No other sea going ship that large would be built until centuries later. The book of Genesis was written about 2,500 BC. The size of the ship described in that book was 135m long, 22.5 meter wide & 13.5 meters tall. Did the person who wrote Genesis build models to see if what they wrote would actually float? Itâs hard to believe those ancient people could build such a large ship using modern stability theory.
Well, Iâm no mathematician. But using a calculator I found online, if you started with 4 couples, assumed a 10.15% increase in population every generation (20 years) and 215 generations in 4,300 years, you would arrive at the earthâs present population by 2024. Somebody please check my math on that. I wonât swear to it.
Now, as to the Arkâs design: the âmodelâ in the article posits the Ark at being 450 long. The longest wooden ship even built was only 350 feet. After that length it becomes hard to make a wooden ship that wonât break in half, and that is with 19th century building methods. The building methods of 5,000 BC wouldnât cut it.
We have, or had, two of the biggest ships ever made in the ancient world still in existence all the way until the 1940s! They were built by Caligula in the first century AD on Lake Nemi in Italy. The biggest was 240 feet long. Note that it was meant for use on a smallish lake, and was just a party boat. It too was reputed to have heated baths etc. .
The boats sank about the time Caligula got the chop. Then, in one of those amazing historical turns, another Roman tyrant, Mussolini, authorized an archaeological project to recover them after 1800 years. They were put on exhibit.
But just as the boats were sunk when Caligula got the chop, the resurrected boats were burned as collateral damage during allied bombing, right about the time Mussolini got strung up. Like they says, history sure rhymes.
Google âNemi boatsâ for the whole fascinating story and photos of the wrecks. But I must admit the reconstruction images are underwhelming. These were glorified rafts more than seagoing vessels.
There are reports of vessels larger than the Nemi boats in antiquity, but the largest never went to sea. When you make human- powered vessels, as ancient ships were, making a vessel past 150 feet long becomes increasingly impractical because of the situation with the oarsmen re: the geometry of seating, and the watering of the men. So it became apparent to ancient shipbuilders that there was no need to evolve ship design to ever larger vessels.
Now, the Ark was essentially a passive lifeboat. A big bathtub that didnât need to be rowed. But it still needed to be seaworthy.
Noah would have needed lots of divine guidance, not passed down to us. Not to mention an army of altruistic goatherds turned boatwrights to help him build it, and who didnât make the voyage.
A major design point re: the Ark is that there is no mention of ballast. Operating a wooden vessel of that size would be impossible IMO without tons of stone ballast. Otherwise the ark would have floated with a sizeable list.
Every few years you read about some nutter who claims to have found wood remains of the ark on some middle-east mountain. What they should be looking for is not wood but an ark-shaped deposit of stone ballast, because thatâs all that would left of the Ark after 7 millennia. The stones would all be of a size easy to move by hand, and they would come from someplace other than the landscape the Ark fetched up on.
Moreover, a ship that size must be designed with structures to keep all that ballast from shifting.
About the Koreanâs calculations re the comfort of the ride: All vessels are comfortable in a flat calm. But even naval architectsâspecialistsâwith recourse to wave tanks etc. can get the comfort factor thing completely wrong in rough seas. I know this from bitter personal experience. So, Iâd put zero faith in the Koreanâs findings.
Now letâs talk about potable water, because the need for potable water was one of the major operating considerations for ancient vessels. Letâs make a simplistic model and say that the Ark was exclusively filled with cows and horses. Each of these drink about 10 gallons of fresh water a day. Letâs say on the Ark they are watered at a starvation ration of 5 gallons a day. Letâs say the livestock total was 100 animals. Thatâs 500 gallons of water a day, or 20,000 gallons for 40 days.
Where would the water be stored? Storage tanks for water are modern invention. Letâs say from 1850s and onwards. Before that, water was stored in wooden casks, But casks werenât invented until Medieval times. Weâre talking about the Stone Age. What could you store that much water in back then? Amphora. Letâs say each held 5 gallons.
So you would need 4,000 amphora. Amphora werenât cheap back then. So, Noah and his family had to corner the amphora market, or start their own factory, and a lot of work underway would be watering the animals. Transferring water from amphora to troughs. An important design thing.
That doesnât account for food at a starvation diet of 5 pounds of hay per day per head of livestock, or 500 pounds a day total or 10 short tons for forty day. Thats just for a model livestock cargo of cows and horses, for a simplified discussion. If you included all animals then youâd have to include food for the predators, and food for the insectivores, which complicates things. But the food would be the easiest part of the enterprise.
A Catholic view on the inerrant Bible -
The Catholic teaching is the Bible is inerrant, it is without error in matters dealing with salvation
It recognizes that the Bible is inspired by God but written by human authors. These authors wrote within their own cultural and historical contexts, using literary forms and styles appropriate to their time. The Church emphasizes that the Holy Spirit guided these authors, ensuring that the essential truths necessary for salvation are faithfully conveyed
Catholic teaching does not believe in a literal bible -
Now I canât speak about how the 50,000 - 100,000 protestant sects (all of which who know they are right) who splintered from the Church feel about that !!
My semi - serious point is, pointing out that the errors of a literal bible interpretation is an ineffective argument against theism, but a very very good argument against a small, but sadly growing number of fundamental sects that quite frankly are just BSC to wake up and join the rest of us in reality.
When I initially mentioned the Arc, prehaps one of the most popularly known ships in history, it was solely for the simplicity of the design/stability reference. The ancient dimensions were widely known & apparently they would meet a stability letter if Noah had to get her classed before sailing? About the story of the flood, a lot of that doesnât add up & thereâs many more questions than answers. My first one that I remember from my childhood, âWhere did all the water all go in 370 days?â In literal context it makes no sense. But good job on simple stability I guess?
They made better progress than this one in Frostburg, MD.
I wish the Holy Spirit would guide an author or two in an update. Itâs been 2000 years since volume II, but I digress. I was required to take one year of religion at the first college I went to and when we were questioning some things we read the professor reminded us that this stuff was recorded on rocks and papyrus for dissemination to an illiterate people so donât take a lot of this literally as they had to simplify things plus the writers were hardly scholars themselves.
Since we have ended up with a discussion of how real the stories in the bible is, here is one from the modern âBibleâ (aka Facebook):
(Based on a story from the Bible about âthe Creationâ)
A short while ago I referred to a biography of JP Morgan that I read several years ago. Again I think of that book & how he stated he believed every word of the Holy Bible (KJV) & read it daily. I remember thinking Morgan was either lying or insane. What kind of nutcase can believe all the fairytales of the Bible? But as the years go by for me I believe more & more of them. Even stories that I used to consider completely impossible. Samson losing his magic hair is ridiculous. But Iâve seen many men get destroyed because they lost their confidence or because of drama with their wives, girlfriend & exâs. Delilah stole his confidence, not his magic hair. Another I didnât get until my later years is the sins of the father will cause punishment for 7 generations afterwards. As a kid I thought that was fckâed up. God was going to punish great-grandchildren for things great-grandpa did!? But after living long enough & thinking about it often I found it was mostly true. But it wasnât God doing the punishment. It was the traumas, bad habits & poor culture passed down from generation to generation that can punishment great-grandchildren for great-grandpaâs mistakes. All those animals on a boat is too far-fetched? But maybe it means something I havenât figured out yet? Iâll keep thinking about it.
Itâs interesting to think what the design parameters of an actual Ark would be. Landlubbers never think about the important stuff, such as the ballast situation.
Also key: cargo loading and stowage. The cargo being two of every kind of animal. How do you get them aboard? To me this is fascinating. Either you go over the hull (a crane or ramp) or through the hull (sideport). Now, building a ramp up to the weather deck from the exterior is simple. But then you have to build a ramp from the weather deck down into the cargo hold. That uses up all sorts of internal space, and requires hatch covers, etc. A lot of design detail.
A lot of design work and divine intervention would go towards preventing the animals from eating each other. Bulkheads, etc.
Letâs dismiss the crane altogether. The Greek and Romans had cranes but they were the high-tech kit of that time.
Then thereâs a sideport. How large would it be? The tallest animal would be a giraffe. Shoulder height 11 feet for a small one. Widest animal, elephant. Call it eight feet wide. So, the sideport has to be something like 12 x 8 feet. Making a hinged sideport is a big design ask, what with the hull being built and 4,000 amphora being baked in kilns. A lot going on while the raindrops fall.
So, maybe they loaded all the animals then just boarded the sideport up, chinked the gaps, etc. The sill of the door would need to be above the load waterline. As I mentioned the Ark would need to be ballasted, so there is a sizable bilge under the deck of the cargo hold. Another design revolution.
Where there is a bilge you need a bilge pump, but we wonât talk about that.
The height of the cargo hold must be big enough to hold a giraffe. Minimum 14 feet. Just one deck under the weather deck, otherwise you need loading ramps internally: more design headaches. So, all the cargo on one single deck, along with the 10 plus tons of feed, and the 4.000 amphora. If this was a journey on rough seas there must be structures to keep all the amphora from shifting in heavy seas.
Jim Jones, David Koresh among others.Hitler also believed in âpositive Christianityâ. Donât forget the Ku Klux Klan whose symbol is the cross and the US christian identity movement allied with the new nazis. They may not believe in the bible but like JP Morgan they cherry pick to suit their purposes. Honestly, if the Jesus depicted in the bible were to return with all his âwokeâ talk, feed the poor, rich men canât get into heaven BS heâd be deported or crucified again in the USA by patriots claiming to be christian.
yea - from personal experience, this attempt at being a reasoned and thoughtful Christian is a bitch !
I donât mind it. You being Catholic should make it pretty easy. I attended Baptist, non-denominational & Pentecostal churches as a child & they tried to tell me what to believe & think. Many of the anti-religion/atheists today are the same. Youâre golden as long as you believe & think like they do. But attending Catholic mass is cool. The Catholic places I visit give the 2 readings from the Bilbe, a paragraph from one of the Gospels for members of the congregation to contemplate. Then a short verbal message from the padre & thatâs it. They keep it pretty mainstream imo. I learned to tune out the judgemental types while attending a bunch of crazy churches as a kid, that skill has helped me immensely as an adult. Reasoned & thoughtfull is the way to go, screw the haters from extremes imo.