Religion

I don't normally touch on the topics of politics or religion. But religion came up the other day.
I would like to discuss a story that nearly everyone who has ever set foot in a church has heard. Noah and the Ark. "The Book of Genesis, chapters 6-9, tells how God sends a great flood to destroy the earth because of man's wickedness and because the earth is corrupt. (By that line of thinking, I would say we are well overdue for another flood) God tells Noah, the righteous man in his generation, to build a large vessel to save his family and a representation of the world's animals. God gives detailed instructions for the Ark and, after its completion, sends the animals to Noah." As I recall, Noah and all of those animals were on the ship for 7 months. As you read above, God gave detailed instructions for the Ark. One source has the ark with dimensions of 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits high. A cubit has been defined as a measure of length to be anywhere from 1.5 to 2.25 feet long. Let's use the 2.25 feet. So the Ark was 675 feet by 112.5 feet wide and 67.5 feet tall. If it were square, which I am sure it wasn't, it would be 5,125,781 cubic feet.

The more I think about it, the more I don't see how this could happen. According to one internet source, there are over 1,250,000 animals in the world. But lets rule out invertibrates which include insects, mollucks, crustaceans. That gets us down to about 60,000 vertebrates. 30,000 of those are fish and another 10,000 are birds. So I guess we can rule them out because they didn't need to be on the ark. Well maybe the birds, but again for simplicity I will leave them out. That leaves 20,000 different species of amphibians, reptiles and mammals. You need two of each animal so that is 40,000 animals all on one boat. And depending upon your source for the story, it was actually seven pairs of the birds and the clean animals. So that 40,000 is a low estimate. But using the number from above, that would give each animal 128 cubic feet of space, or a space 5 foot by 5 foot by 5 foot. Do you think it would be possible today with our advanced technology, to accomplish such a feat? I don't. Allow me to explain.


I am going to try to simplify things here. For storage of these animals I am going to assume they would be kept in TEUs (20-foot Equivalent Unit), more commonly known as shipping containers, as pictured here. A shipping container normally measures 20 foot by 8.5 foot by 8 foot. That is 1360 cubic feet per container. I am going to use an assumption here that you can store 4 animals per container. Sure you can probably get more in some containers, and less in others. Although I wouldn't try this if PETA was around. Alright so we have 40,000 animals at 4 per container means you will need 10,000 TEU. The largest cargo ship in the world is the Xin Los Angeles. Here is a photo.
The Xin Los Angeles is 1,105 feet in length and can carry 9200 TEUs. That is about 800 fewer than what I would need. But I am willing to look past that. Let's say somehow you cram 40,000 animals into 9200 TEUs. You still have to feed them. Here is what I have found are some of the daily eating habits of just a few animals.
Wild Elephants eat 330 pounds a day.
Giraffe 75 pounds a day.
Gorilla 40 pounds a day.
Hippopotamus 88 pounds a day.
For those 4 animals that is 533 pounds of food a day, times 2 because there is two of each of them, times 7 for each month, times 30 for each day. That is 223,860 pounds of food. And you have 39,992 other animals to feed, not to mention you have no place to store any of this food.

Oh and what about water, you are going to need fresh water for these animals. Obviously you couldn't store all of that water, you would need a super tanker. And as I recall from the story there was only one ark. Maybe Noah built a desalination plant into his ark. I doubt any desalination plant that could supply 100,000 or more gallons of water a day would be very small. Oh and of course Noah is building this ark out of wood with hand tools.

I know that Noah's family was with him on the ark. I have yet to find out how many members of his family there were. Let's just suppose that there were 100 people in his family. I doubt it, but it helps with the numbers. That means every family member had to feed 400 animals. Pretty sure all of those animals had different diets.

And lastly, let's suppose it would even be possible to build an ark that could house 40,000 animals for 7 months and the food and provide clean water, Noah was over 600 years old when all of this happened. Nope, I am sorry, I don't see someone 600 years old building an ark by himself by hand.

I know, all you church going folk out there, let me have it. I am not saying that I don't believe in God, to be honest I really hope there is a God. But if you could just get back on how this whole ark thing worked, because as the story goes now, with the information I just put forward, it doesn't add up. I would be happy to discuss.

Side topic, I think it is safe to say that our medical technology today is leaps and bounds ahead of what Noah had available. So human beings life expectancy, despite an increase in health care (remember they used to have plagues), has dropped from over 600 years to a current world average of 67.2 years. Can anyone explain this to me?

Lyric of the Day:
Well there is a loneliness inside her,
And she'll do anything to fill it in.
And though it is red blood bleeding from her now,
It feels like holding blue ice in her heart,
She feels like kicking out all of the windows ,
And setting fire to this life,
She would change everything about her using colors bold and bright,
But all of the colors mix together to grey.