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Noah's Ark ....some interesting facts .................

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.. the generally accepted size of the ark is 155 metres long, 25 metres wide and 15 metres high and it was to contain three decks, a side-opening door pair and a one-cubit square window at the top. ..

. It is of particular interest to speculate how Noah would have housed and fed the 10 000 known species of termites on his wooden ark. .

. Although Noah had three sons who may have willingly helped him with the building chores ..These four were required to acquire boat-building skills, acquire tools, negotiate the rights or acquire a forest in an arid area, harvest the 'gopher wood' forests, transport monstrous logs from the forest to the boat-building site, season the timber over a number of years such that it would not rot or split, cut the timber, build docks, scaffolds arid workshops, build a vessel of very large heavy planks plus a maze of cages of variable size, shape and design, collect tonnes of pitch and caulk the boat, and finally, gather provisions for the millions of known and unknown organ­isms who had cruise tickets. . Recently I asked Halvorsens, a Sydney boat-­builder, to provide me with an estimate of the building time for a work force of four for a boat of this size. . if Noah arid his four willing labouring sons were to attempt such a task some 4000 years ago, then they would still be building the vessel! The building task would be slightly com­pounded by the fact that some of the earlier craftsmanship would have rotted away. ..

.. The total amount of water carried for the animals would have sunk the ark, the total weight of provisions would have sunk the ark, the total weight of vertebrates would have sunk the ark many times, the amount of excreta generated would have sunk the ark every five days and the aquarium for a pair of whales genus, would have sunk the ark many times. Furthermore, if a couple of the large animals had the urge to procreate, the ark would become terribly unstable. Imagine if the two 80-tonne Ultrasaurus dinosaurs converted the snaking stinking sinking overcrowded freighter into a love boat. The ark would have capsized! .

. On the assumption that the animals came on two by two (and not seven pairs), each animal would have some 1150 cubic centimetres (i.e. the volume of a milk carton) of shipboard space for living the 371 days at sea. ..

. Noah and his family would have shared this tiny ark with 30 million pairs of known and extinct organisms. . The Bible tells us that all organisms were loaded in a 24-hour day (Genesis 77:11-15) thereby requiring 460 organisms per second to enter the ark over this period. .

. Noah .had to decide which humans were going to carry the diseases which only occur in humans. Humans are the only host for numerous diseases including measles, pueumococcal pneumonia, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox, leprosy, poliomyelitis, five types of syphilis and gonorrhoea, AIDS, hepatitis, shingles, four types of rnalarial par­asites, two types of tapeworm, an intestinal worm, hookworm, three agents of filariasis, two species of Schistosoma, pinworm, three types of lice, various types of fever (for example, Japanese river fever), kuru, just to mention a few. The disease kuru only occurs in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. . Poor Noah. Which family member did he instruct to go and pick the brains of a kuru sufferer so that the natives of the highlands of Papua New Guinea can enjoy the disease today? Which one of his family did Noah instruct to seduce a syphilitic in order to pre­serve the disease for the benefit and transmission by post-flood hominids? How did Noah stop every, one of his family from catch­ing highly infectious diseases such as typhoid fever, cholera, yellow fever and malaria? ....

. The magnitude of the feeding task is astronomical. If the crew of four males worked 24 hours a day for the 371 days at sea, then each animal would have received a total of six seconds of attention for the whole year. In the six seconds, the animals would have to be fed and watered at least 3 7/1 times and presumably the stalls had to be cleaned in order to avoid an outbreak of disease. Such animal­ care activities by an incredibly diseased crew who would undertake these shipboard duties in darkness below decks on a wildly lurching, grossly overcrowded, unstable leaking ark defies credulity.

. Assuming that the daily feeding, watering and excercising of 30 million pairs of organisms was carried out with diligent success, the less pleasant duty of the disposal of mountainous volumes of urine and excreta was a daily chore for the crew. . The overworked crew would have to bucket all the waste fluids and solids from below decks and dispose of it overboard. It is a little difficult to calculate the volume of excreta generated by extinct animals, however even the most basic calculations show that thousands of tonnes of urine and excreta were generated on a daily basis by those unwilling passengers. We must remember, that the ark had a ' ventilation port of one cubit square so the atmosphere below decks was' obviously indescribably fetid. . When one looks at moderately frequent spontaneous combus­tion of methane in well-ventilated coal mines, one wonders how Noah avoided the spontaneous combustion of the monstrous volumes of a methane-oxygen mix below decks. Such an explosion would totally fragment the unstable leaking overcrowded ark if the organisms on the ark had not already died from suffocation, res­piratory disease and outbreaks of every conceivable pathogen. ..

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From Ian Plimer's "Telling Lies For God: Reason vs Creationism" (Random House; Sydney:1994) pp 104 -134