Our planet’s temperatures and sea levels are rising fast!
Global Warming is a big problem, you might say.
And big problems call for big solutions, epic solutions,
...hell, even biblical solutions.
That’s right, it might be time to build an Ark, get on board,
save life on Earth, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all this to blow over.
But how big would an Ark need to be?
Can we just copy the one Noah built in the bible?
And how many of each animal are we going to need so we can rebuild?
I’m Stu, this is Debunked and we’re here to sort the truths from the myths,
and the facts from the misconceptions.
Right, if we’re getting biblical with this, the first port of call has to be, well, the Bible,
and the good book is actually pretty specific about what God said to Noah;
“...make yourself an ark of cypress wood;
make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.”
“This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long,
fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high”
Now a cubit is a slightly archaic unit of measure. Take the distance from the tip of
a person’s middle finger to their elbow and you’ve got yourself a cubit. There’s just a
slight problem with the cubit - different ancient cultures ended up with different distances,
so a cubit can be anywhere between 45.5 centimetres 17.9” to 52.3 centimetres 20.6”.
Still, that hasn’t stopped people re-building Noah’s Ark.
His ark opened to the public in 2012
and measures 135 meters long, 30 meters wide and 23 meters high.
Another copy, in Williamstown, Kentucky, USA... ...comes in at 155 meters long, 26 meters wide,
15 meters high, that’s 508FT Long, 85FT Wide and 49ft High.
So, you can see, that cubits are very much open to interpretation.
To put that in perspective, the Titanic was 269 meters or 883
feet long, 28 meters or 93 feet wide and about 31 meters, 104 feet deep.
Sure, it’s even taller if you include, everything, but you can’t keep a passenger in a funnel.
It’s all well and good building a replica ark and sticking it on dry ground, but in the flood
to come, we need an ark that will float. We don’t want another titanic-sized disaster on our hands.
The good news, folks, is that an ark built to the dimensions laid down in the bible and made
from cypress wood would float, according to a study at the University of Leicester.
Using a cubit of 48.2 centimetres / 1.58FT,
...this resulted in an ark measuring 144.6 meters long, 24.1 meters wide and 14.46 meters tall,
which is 474.4FT LONG X 79FT WIDE X 47.4FT HIGH - pretty close to those other replicas.
Now a boat that big, roughly the size of a small cargo ship, built out of cypress wood,
is coming in at 1.2 million kilograms or 2.65 million pounds of weight,
and would float pretty nicely in sea water. The study found it would only
be dipping into the water by 0.34 meters or 1.1FT.
But we’re not launching this vessel into the local boating lake,
we need it to do a little more than just float,
we need this to be truly seaworthy and withstand the largest flood the Earth has ever known.
This is where biblical science starts to fall down.
A wooden vessel of this size in a biblical flood would come up against some critical
structural issues when at sea, the ark may even break in half.
You see, a smaller boat would comfortably float along the waves,
over the Crests and into the Troughs. A vessel the size of Noah’s Ark would instead
suffer substantial strain as it crossed the waves causing massive amounts of sagging and hogging,
which would lead to structural failures in the middle portion of the ark at the top and bottom
alternately as it travelled across the Crest and Trough of the waves.
Structural failures like this even occur in modern large ships.
'NOAH'S BIGGEST DESIGN PROBLEM IS THAT HE IS LIMITED BY THE SIZE OF AVAILABLE TREES’
Wood is a great material to build boats from – it's strong and light. However,
without modern glues and steel plates it is not possible for Noah to join all his beams together
to create a single super beam strong enough to support the hull.
Once he goes longer than an available trunk, he needs to build a giant wooden scaffold inside
the boat to keep it from collapsing under the water pressure. Even then,
wood isn’t the stiffest material, so a well reinforced biblical super yacht
is going to bend like a banana in a big storm.
The reasoning behind this is why the largest wooden ship ever constructed,
the Wyoming in 1909, was only two thirds the size of Noah’s Ark.
And even at this size, in heavier seas the Wyoming flexed and twisted opening up seams in its hull
causing leaks that required pumps to keep the hold only relatively free of water,
despite these measures, it still eventually filled with water and sank in 1924.
Subsequent wooden ships were reinforced with steel to ensure their seaworthiness.
It’s been suggested that Noah could have instead built a flotilla of smaller boats,
which he could attach to one another with ropes and gangplanks. Then his fleet could
move independently of each other and go with the flow of the waves, rather than resisting them.
“IF NOAH DIDN’T HAVE HIS NAVAL ENGINEERING DEGREE, HE COULD ALWAYS TRY JUST TYING AS MANY TREE TRUNKS
TOGETHER AS POSSIBLE AND CREATING A GIANT RAFT. CYPRESS WOOD IS ABOUT HALF THE WEIGHT OF WATER, SO
A FULLY SUBMERGED CUBIC METRE OF WOOD HAS ENOUGH BUOYANCY TO SUPPORT HALF A TONNE OF ANIMALS.”
But let's say the floods weren’t at all like the scenes from the Aronofsky movie…
...and let’s instead say that the planned flood meant that water levels would slowly rise,
delicately lifting the ark from the ground and then gently floating it around in calm
waters for the next few months. More of a serene cruise shall we say.
All we have to do now is load up all the species before the end game,
but what kind of cargo capacity would the ark have without overloading it
and sending the future of all life plunging to the ocean depths.
For this we need to know the Ark’s buoyancy force, which according to Archimedes principle
is equal to the weight of the volume of water the Ark displaces. The University Of Leicester
study could then estimate the total mass the ark could support before gravitational weight would
overcome the buoyancy force and sink the ark. This was calculated as 50.54x10^6 kg.
In other words, the ark could house 50 million kilograms or around 55,000
US Tons of cargo without any trouble. I think we can all agree, that’s a big load.
The last thing to do then, is start loading up all the animals before those sea levels start rising.
The boffins at Leicester took the humble sheep as the ‘average’ mass for the animals coming
aboard and, at 23.47kg or 51.74 pounds per sheep, the biblical ark would have been able to support
2.15 million sheep without sinking. That’s, of course, if we’re only talking about mass.
However, that doesn’t mean the ark can fit all those sheep inside. After all,
the idea is to keep the animals alive, which means giving them a bit of space to live and breathe.
According to official UK guidance, the space a sheep should have is around 1.2 square meters
or 12.9 square feet. Plus they’ll need a bit of room to stand up in,
again, to keep things simple and make a cube, let’s say 1.1m or 3.6 feet. That means the
space required to house a sheep on the ark is about 1.33 cubic meters or 46.97 cubic feet..
In transport that space is lower, at 0.5 square meters or 5.38 square feet per animal.
We’ll say 0.34 cubic meters, 12.00 cubic feet.
The hypothetical ark put forward by Leicester University had a capacity of just over
50,391 cubic meters / 1,779,541 cubic feet or, in animals terms,
37,887 sheep living in comfort or 148,209 sheep crammed in transport style.
All this begs the question, did Noah’s Ark have enough space to do the job. Now according to the
Bible, God also laid down instructions about the number of animals he had to take with him.
“Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal,
a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate,”
“...and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female,
to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.”
Just how many animals is that though? In news that should not come as a shock, religion and science
once again start to disagree here. Let’s quickly address how biblical scholars interpret this.
The language used in the bible here is crucial,
note how it mentions kinds of animals - this isn’t particularly specific.
It could mean anything ranging from species all the way up to the family
level in scientific taxonomy - and there’s a big difference between those classifications.
At the species level you’d take domestic dogs,
gray wolves, coyotes and a range of similar species.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, if it was just from the same family,
in this case Canidae, you'd just take a red fox
and say that’ll do, no need for any dogs or wolves. We’ve got that animal family covered.
Anyway, what that means, according to biblical scholars, is that Noah only had
to take between 2,000 and 50,000 individual animals on the ark to get the job done.
In which case, there’d be more than enough space to ensure the survival of life.
Or at least there’s enough room to pack them all in, until a storm hits,
sinking the unseaworthy vessel, drowning the last of the remaining land dwellers.
But let’s go back to our original scenario,
those pesky ice caps and rising sea levels are coming for us after all.
What would it take to save all the species on Earth right now? Let’s crunch the numbers.
Pinning down the exact number of animal species isn’t easy - there could be up
to 30 million species of invertebrates alone.
However, a widely-cited study in 2011 estimated that there
were approximately 8.7 million species on Earth.
Thankfully for the construction of our ark, we’ve only identified and classified
1.25 million of them so far,
it would be quite a challenge to get unidentified species on the boat,
so they’re going to get wet when the flood comes.
Right, so we're down to 1.25 million species, but to make things even more
simple for our ark designers, not all of those species are ‘animals’. In fact,
only 950,000 of living species were classed as such - the rest being plants, fungi, protozoa
(those are single-celled organisms, like amoebas) and chromista (which are things like algae).
And, the final trick we're pulling is that only 75%
of species live on land - if you're used to water, then you're on your own,
or you’ll need to seek refuge in one of those fresh water pockets or deep sea aquifers.
The end result is that we need to find space for 712,500 different species on the Debunked Ark
Then we come to the whole ‘two by two’ mantra.
Sure, it will technically ensure the survival of the species but it’s fair
to say that the second generation and the ones after will be pretty inbred.
Would the ‘seven pairs’, or 14 individuals also
mentioned in the bible be enough to keep things healthy - probably not.
The minimum viable population (MVP) is the lowest number a biological
group can fall to before the chances of extinction start to get serious.
A smaller population might be wiped out by changes in the environment or a natural
disaster, and, over time, lack of genetic diversity
can impact the health and adaptability of the group. In other words, the more the merrier.
So what is the MVP for animals? Well, it depends.
Let’s take humans, a 2002 study by Anthropologist John Moore, in which he studied how many people
would be needed for a 200 year space mission, concluded you’d need a population of 160.
Over two centuries you're looking at 8 to 10 generations but, because of the small
starting population, you'd end up with diminished genetic diversity over time.
To stop this genetic drift, the space travellers would need to
return to Earth after 200 years to mix things up.
A 2019 study of 36 species of freshwater fish in the Yangtze River,
yielded MVPs ranging from 42 to 320.
Other studies have concluded average MVPs across multiple species ranging from 4,169 to 7,316.
However, since the 1980s, the so-called ’50/500’ rule
has been used as a general guide for MVP. The rule was put forward by Ian
Franklin, an Australian geneticist, and Michael Soulé, an American biologist.
They claimed 50 was the magic number required to prevent inbreeding
and 500 was the number needed to keep genetic drift at bay.
The 50/500 rule is questioned by many and, as we’ve seen,
doesn’t necessarily work as an easy catch all. However, we'll go with 500,
since we want to avoid genetic drift once all this flood business has died down.
That means we need 500 individuals for each of the 712,500
land animals, leaving us with an ark that has to carry 356.3
million animals. Noah’s Ark suddenly seems really cramped, even in business class..
Now I know what you’re thinking - “Stu, not all animals are the
size of sheep!” - and it’s a good point - just 3 to 5% of animals are vertebrates,
meaning our Ark has about 28,500 species that would be in ‘sheep range’.
How much space would they need?
At 0.34 cubic meters / 12 cubic feet per animal, and 500 animals per species we’re looking at;
4,845,000 cubic meters or 171,099,560 cubic feet, if we’re cramming them in transport style.
Well, we still have 96% of animals needing a home,
but the good news is that invertebrates aren’t massive, so if we say all invertebrates aboard
have the average size of the common pavement ant,
around 3mm / 0.1 INCH in length, how much space are these little ones going to need?
Alternatively, if we were being more generous, we could base our invertebrate section
on Megaloblatta longipennis, which holds the world record for the largest cockroach
at 97mm in length and and 45mm across. That would leave us needing;
For quick maths and to make sure there’s enough space for all the terrifying,
bird-eating tarantulas, we’ll say our Debunked Ark needs 5,000,000 cubic
meters (4,845,000 + 67,000 = 4,912,000), that’s around 176,573,334 cubic feet.
Which is a long way of saying that Noah’s Ark is too small to save life on earth,
we’d actually need a fleet of 100 Noah's Arks (5,000,000/50,391), or a larger
flotilla of even smaller wooden arks as our structural engineer previously suggested.
Have humans ever come close to building a gargantuan, 5 million cubic meter vessel?
No, but we've probably come closer than you think.
Take the Seawise Giant, which was constructed
way back in 1979. The vessel was 458 meters OR 1504 feet long , 30 meters OR 98 FEET deep
and 69 meters OR 225 FT wide - giving it a rough capacity of 937,000 cubic meters.
It wasn’t the most practical ship, when fully loaded it would sit 24 meters nearly 79 feet
below the ocean’s surface and it was so big it couldn’t navigate the English Channel,
Panama Canal or Suez Canal. It was longer than the Empire State Building is tall.
The bad news? It was scrapped for metal in 2010, so we’ll need to build a new
ark in time for the next great flood, well, actually we'll need 5 of them.
BUT WAIT! What about feeding the beasts?!? Well Noah’s Ark was afloat for 150 days
and keeping with our control source, a sheep would consume 150KGs of grass over that period!
Where as your average common ant would only consume up to 0.0015KG
That would leave us with 3420 KG of food for all the invertebrates
And a whopping 51.3 BILLION KG for all our vertebrates.
The World's Largest Container Vessel can theoretically carry around 232
million kgs of cargo that’s over 256,000 us tons,
meaning we’d need 195 of these to keep our passengers alive for the 150 day voyage! Blimey!