Noah's Ark Found?
Not that this whole Noah's ark thing is my forte, but to have a boat that carried two of every base species of animal, not to mention food for 40 days to sustain the diets of each animal. Given the proposed dimensions of the boat, It just doesn't seem... likely.
Quote:Original post by ChurchSkiz
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/has-noahs-ark-been-found/20060629173309990001?cid=2194
I'm not going to rush out and say that this is Noah's Ark. But if it's not, why is a petrified piece of wood the size of an aircraft carrier sitting 13,000 feet up on a mountain?
Everybody gotta be somewhere.
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What do you nonbelievers think this is?
Best case scenario: A petrified piece of wood the size of an aircraft carrier sitting 13,000 feet up on a mountain.
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And if after further study we see that it is the same dimension and layout as the boat in the bible, would you be willing to accept that it is Noah's Ark?
I think it would be difficult to establish that a piece of wood had the same "layout" as a boat described in the Bible, particularly when the Bible doesn't actually specify the layout of the ark. Where was the galley?
A reasonable supposition would be that people had seen this petrified 'boat' in Biblical times. Seeing petrified objects gave ancient folk tales of Medusa and gorgons. Why not a tale of a giant boat?
Even if it could be established that it really was a giant boat built in Biblical times, that wouldn't in any sense prove that there was a global flood of the type depicted in the Bible. Somebody could simply have wasted a great deal of time on building a massive boat. It may even have been of symbolic significance, and never intended to be seaworthy (in the vein of Viking boat burials.)
When future archeologists find Cold War-era nuclear fallout shelters buried under the ground, will they assume that there was necessarily a nuclear war at that time?
Quote:Original post by ChurchSkiz
Engineering wise, I believe they've made models of the ark given the dimensions and they were found to be sea-worthy.
That's one claim that's begging to be backed up by fact.
Anyway, we're missing a few key facts here.
First, how old is it? What did the place look like back then? 13000 feet today might not have been 13000 feet back then. The terrain might have been different, the *treeline* might have been different.
Next up, assuming it got there by the world being flooded,
- What happened to all the water?
- Why couldn't a bunch of "ordinary" wood have drifted there? Wood tends to float as it is. If the world was flooded, wouldn't we have tons and tons of wood drifting around, *and getting stuck on the few bits of land that were left*? If an ark can get there, so can driftwood.
As for the ark itself, a quick search tells me that there exists something like 5500 species of mammals. (Restricted my search to mammals to get a lower bound, because you might argue that birds didn't need room on the ark, for example)
So, 5500 species, that gives us 11000 individual animals. With the dimensions of that ark, it gives us something like 50x50 cm per animal, if they were "stored" in one layer only. Admittedly, it seems to have been high enough for a few more layers, but we also need room for all the food, right? And all the non-mammal species. And the bigger-than-rabbit ones. Would have been a tight fit, at the least. And any zoo will happily tell you how difficult it is to keep some animals alive in captivity for even a few weeks.
And what about climate? Polar bears or penguins might not have appreciated being stuck on a ship in (sub?)tropical regions. And how did they *get* to the ark in the first place? Don't tell me that *their* part of the world wasn't flooded, please. We just established that the water line was 13000 feet higher than today, right?
But to answer the original question, I, as a nonbeliever, do not know what it is. Most likely, it's just a big pile of wood on a mountain. Is that really so unlikely that it *must* involve some kind of divine intervention?
[Edited by - Spoonbender on June 30, 2006 9:31:15 AM]
Oh and just so no one pulls out that stupid "water vapour has enough water in it to have caused the flood!" argument, there's only 12,921 cubic kilometers of water in our air, which is enough to cover only one inch of the entire planets surface.
Quote:Original post by ChurchSkiz
Well the old findings in Turkey were harder to verify because no one can go up there. This site can be verified, hiked too, and up close pictures can be taken. I mean even in the article they have a closeup.
So although it may or may not be the ark, at least it can be researched and refuted from both sides.
And the bias goes both ways.
Ravuya, wouldn't a piece of wood the size of an aircraft carrier 13,000 feet high be a little suspect? It surely isn't natural and I doubt anyone would spend the effort to haul it up there.
One would verify it being the Ark because the bible records exact descriptions of dimensions and layout. Also, since the wood is old and petrified, it's not like you could build one up there and then "pretend" to find it like the James Box. Also, it's size and weight prevents it from being moved up there. So realistically, either it is a boat that floated up there some time ago, or it is something else entirely (maybe an old building or something?)
If it is found to be a boat of any kind, one has to ask the question: How would anyone know in advance that a massive flood was coming giving them enough time to build such a massive structure?
Most likely anything found on a mountain like that is early temples. We as humans have this odd desire to build grand things in foolish places (Temple of Delphi anyone? or almost any grand Greek temple? Those guys were REALLY nuts when it came to picking a spot for their temples. "Hey, you see that big cliff there that has no safe path to the top? Lets move hundereds of tonnes of stone for a building up there!")
Might also be the results of landslides, pulling large amounts of trees off a narrow part of the hill, and bunching them up on a halfway level spot (or tangling in other trees after losing enough force) If this was done with a snowslide from the peak knocking out a strip of trees, draging them to one spot on the hill, and then that spring a mudslide covering them, it could preserve that mass of wood (which would appear to be lined up, running up and down the hill for the most part, with some laying across as they get pushed around) which is a MUCH easier option than an impossible amount of water letting an impossibly large ship float to the top.
The story of the ark simply doesn't make sense anyway, most likely it was the story of a man somewhere that had built a boat large enough for his extended family, and their farm animals. When you consider taking two of every animal would mean any preators would strave, or you would lose several kinds of animals to feed them. (or were the unicorns just really really filling?) To take enough animals of each species, you would need something on the order of supertanker size, if not more. And that doesn't even store the food for them likely.
Just did a little quick googling, http://www.ybw.com/ibinews/newsdesk/20040204104140ibinews.html
largest sailship being built, a superyacth, less than 90m, and the Hellespont Fairfax (a supertanker) is nearly 400m long. And you are telling me someone 4000 years ago or so made ships that could compare to what we're just building now?
Quote:Original post by ChurchSkiz
Engineering wise, I believe they've made models of the ark given the dimensions and they were found to be sea-worthy.
But did they make them out of gopher wood?
Quote:Original post by Strider_Hiryu
Not that this whole Noah's ark thing is my forte, but to have a boat that carried two of every base species of animal, not to mention food for 40 days to sustain the diets of each animal. Given the proposed dimensions of the boat, It just doesn't seem... likely.
Yeah I mathematically debunked Noahs ark in the huge thread. The biblicans jumped on me and said that God made it so that the animals didn't need food.
I think I calculated that each animal would have been allocated less than 1 cubic metre of space each (using generous calculations in favour of the biblican myth), but I can't really remember right now.
Quote:Original post by RavuyaQuote:Original post by SandmanQuote:Original post by RavuyaQuote:Original post by Sandman
gopher wood. No-one knows what that is though.
How do they know it's gopher wood then?
That's what the bible says the ark is made of.
Well, that's conveniently unverifiable. I wonder what kind of wood this big chunk of Persian wood is.
Furthermore, the bible is the SOLE reference to the word "gopher wood" in the entire history of humanity. It's never been used anywhere else. "Hapax legomenon".
Quote:Original post by Spoonbender
Next up, assuming it got there by the world being flooded,
- Why couldn't a bunch of "ordinary" wood have drifted there? Wood tends to float as it is. If the world was flooded, wouldn't we have tons and tons of wood drifting around, *and getting stuck on the few bits of land that were left*? If an ark can get there, so can driftwood.
oh, good point, where is all the massive abounts of driftwood getting stuck up on every mountain? Where is the giant 'bathtub ring' on the planet?
Quote:Original post by Talroth
Just did a little quick googling, http://www.ybw.com/ibinews/newsdesk/20040204104140ibinews.html
largest sailship being built, a superyacth, less than 90m, and the Hellespont Fairfax (a supertanker) is nearly 400m long. And you are telling me someone 4000 years ago or so made ships that could compare to what we're just building now?
Perhaps this mysterious 'gopher wood' is like those novelty shaped bath sponges you get for kids ..... when you add water it expands into an ark!! ;p
sorry thats just me being silly. It does amaze me what was man has acheived without the aid of modern day tools and technology so perhaps it was possible for them to build such an ark. Its not so much the ark I find absurd though as everything else to do with the story.
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