Arnold Mendez Is An Idiot, Chapter 970

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What with the Fred and Wilma museum opening I thought it time to do the math on this here boat that Noah knocked up in his back garden.
So we will read the original architect's specs and determine a size.

"And God said unto Noah, . . . Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this [is the fashion] which thou shalt make it [of]: The length of the ark [shall be] three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; [with] lower, second, and third [stories] shalt thou make it. " (Gen. 6:13-16)

Which indisputably converts to (all dimensions in feet) 450 long x 75 wide x 45 high.

Now before we go any further, a wooden vessel of this size is quite simply an impossibility, it would simply fall apart with the first ripple. Wood does not have the tensile strength to sustain the stresses involved.

There has never been a wooden vessel built that comes even close to these dimensions, and as the Victorians found to there cost when they tried to push the envelope in timber, you require an awful lot of iron to keep the thing from falling apart, and I'm talking iron beams not nails.

So just as an academic exercise let us have a look at this here boat of Noahs'.

A three decker, a ship of the line no less, so three decks plus a top and a bottom, for our purposes five decks.
So I have taken as a reasonable assumption planking width for the decks to be eight inches.

Now every boat has longitudinal stringers, and here I shall keep the number low at 30

A boat also has frames or ribs if you wish, and here again I will be generous and place them at three foot centres.

And just before I throw a few figures at you, anybody that has ever built a boat will tell you there are as many saw cuts that are not part of the boat as those that are, all the cuts to waste as it were.

So here we go. again all dimensions in feet.

Longitudinal stringers...........................30x450=13,500
Frames bottom..........................................150x75=11,250
Frames sides x 2........................................150x45= 6,750
.......................................................................................6,750
Crossbeams x 4 three decks + roof 150x75=11,250
......................................................................................11,250
......................................................................................11,250
......................................................................................11,250
Decks x 5 number of planks at 8 inch. 112x450= 50,400
......................................................................................50,400
......................................................................................50,400
......................................................................................50,400
......................................................................................50,400
Sides x 2 number of planks.......................67x450=30,150
.......................................................................................30,150
Bow and stern number of planks...................67x75=5,025
.........................................................................................5,025

Gives a total of..........................................................423.600 ft.
Multiply four sides, don't forget cutting to waste=1694,400
Divide by 5280...........................................................= 320 miles of (with grain) saw cuts.

And that's the basic hull and decks, no stalls for the dinosaurs taken into account.

But there is another little cuddly that rears it's little bothersome head in this equation, it's fifteen hundred years before the Iron Age, what might I ask did our Noah use for a saw?


And if you think I'm a right sad bastard for doing the math on this all I can say is go and visit our friend Arnold Mendez and have a look at his math. (and reasoning) Now that's what you call a proper sad bastard.

Now if you're a bit of a cynic like meself you'de might be thinking how old Noah managed to put this bit of a boat together, it being the early Bronze Age n'all, well guess who has a few few answers for us, non other than himself our old pal Ken Ham and his Answers in Genisis

How could Noah build the Ark?
The Bible does not tell us that Noah and his
sons built the Ark by themselves, and Noah
could have hired skilled laborers. However, there
is no reason to believe that they could not—or
that they did not—build the Ark between them-
selves in just a few years.

The physical strength and mental processes of
men in Noah’s day was at least as great (quite
likely, even superior) to our own. They certainly
would have had efficient means for harvest-
ing and cutting timber, as well as for shaping,
transporting and erecting the massive beams and
boards required.
If one or two men today can erect a large house
in just 12 weeks, how much more could three or
four men do in a few years? Adam’s descendants
were making complex musical instruments,
forging metal and building cities—their tools,
machines and techniques were not inferior to
the ones we use today.

It is evident from examining the “mysteries”
of earlier civilizations that the human race has
likely lost just as much (maybe even more)
knowledge from before the Flood as it has
gained since that time. The idea that ancient
generations were more primitive than ours is an
evolutionary concept.

In reality, when God created Adam, he was
perfect. Today, the human intellect has suffered
from 6,000 years of sin and decay—though
computers (a tool designed and built in the last
60 years) are compensating a great deal for our
natural decline in mental processing power,
permitting us to gather and store information as
perhaps never before.