Nye Debate Reasoning

[Eric1958]

I like the old phrase "give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves". Let Ham borrow enough to build his arc and in ten years it'll be ancient history.

[stromboli]

I like the old phrase "give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves". Let Ham borrow enough to build his arc and in ten years it'll be ancient history.

Some years ago I read a piece by an engineer that pointed out the largest wooden sailing vessel built in the west was only 380 feet long, and built in a dedicated shipyard by a highly trained crew. The only boats built on the scale of the ark were built by the Chinese, but included metal work as well as wood. And they were built by a legion of workers in a dynasty with practically unlimited resources. An all wood, ocean going ark of that size is a near physical impossibility; it would require so much inner support there would be no room for anything else.

[stromboli]

Further info on the ark:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4279

Allow me to explain. What's known as the square-cube law is pretty familiar: increase an object's dimensions, and its surface area increases by the square of the multiplier, and its weight increases by the cube of the multiplier. But one extension of this law is less familiar. When we scale up an object — take a wooden structural beam as an example — the strength of the beam does not increase as fast as its weight. Applied mechanics and material sciences give us all the tools we need to compute this. In summary, the tensile strength of a beam is a function of its moment and its section modulus. No need to go into the complicated details here — you can look up beam theory on Wikipedia if you want to learn the equations. Scale up a simple wooden beam large enough, the weight will exceed its strength, and it will break from its own weight alone. Scaled up to the immense size of Noah's Ark, a stout wooden box would be unspeakably fragile.

If there was even the gentlest of currents, sufficient pressure would be put on the hull to open its seams. Currents are not a complete, perfectly even flow. They consist of eddies and slow-moving turbulence. This puts uneven pressure on the hull, and Noah's Ark would bend with those eddies like a snake. Even if the water itself was perfectly still, wind would expose the flat-sided Ark's tremendous windage, exerting a shearing force that might well crumple it.

I suspect that, even built on land, it will be a huge monstrosity that will by itself prove the impossibility of the ark existing.

[Jason78]

Maybe gopher wood is magic and doesn't break.

[stromboli]

The Greek Septuagint (3rd–1st centuries BC) translated it as xylon tetragonon, "squared timber".[2] Similarly, the Latin Vulgate (5th century AD) rendered it as lignis levigatis (lævigatis, in the Clementine Vulgate), "smoothed (possibly planed) wood".
The Jewish Encyclopedia believes it was most likely a translation of the Babylonian "gushure i÷ erini" (cedar-beams), or the Assyrian "giparu" (reed).[3] The Aramaic Targum Onkelos, considered by many Jews to be an official translation of the Hebrew scripture renders this word as ????? (qadros) i.e., cedar. The Syriac Peshitta translates this word as ???? ('arqa), box wood.[4]
Many modern English translations tend to favor cypress (although otherwise the word for "cypress" in Biblical Hebrew is berosh). This was espoused (among others) by Adam Clarke, a Methodist theologian famous for his commentary on the Bible: Clarke cited the resemblance between Greek word for cypress, kuparisson and the Hebrew word gophar.
Other suggestions include pine, cedar, fir, teak, sandalwood, ebony, wicker, juniper, acacia, boxwood, slimed bulrushes and resinous wood, and even American trees such as Cladrastis kentukea (American yellowwood), although the latter did not exist in the region the ark was supposedly built.[citation needed]
Others, noting the physical similarity between the Hebrew letters g and k, suggest that the word may actually be kopher, the Hebrew word meaning "pitch"; thus kopher wood would be pitched wood. Recent suggestions have included a lamination process (to strengthen the Ark), or a now-lost type of tree, but there is no consensus.[5]

I would go with "pitched wood" since that is one of the most common forms of ships of ancient days. That would mean the ark was possibly built with pine, since that is where pitch comes from. It is also the most commonly available wood in the US.