Existence of Noah's Ark

In case people are curious whether Noah worked with titanium... No.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

According to you, he only needed one amino acid to start the entire list of species over again, lmao.

Apart from the fact that you're talking about a straw man (you need millions of metric tons of amino acids, in a wide variety of environments across the earth, for about a billion years), are you *agreeing* with abiogenesis?

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

It was a joke.

On a more serious note, I once saw a Christian TV show that claimed that the ark would indeed hold all the species of the earth, and that there was room enough left over for the dinosaurs.I was wondering if this was actually correct or not. We know the size of the ark, can we figure out how much space the 18,000,000 species would actually need?
Lets assume they will all live in harmony, since God sent them there.Lets not include the freshwater species since how the flood happened, if it did, has not been determend by science yet. I feel as though if it rained hard enough to flood the earth, provided there was enough water, that the water over land would still be fresh water, and higher than sea level, because it would be draining back to the sea. So all water dwelling creatures would be able to survive a flood.

18 million? You're off by a factor of one thousand or so. The most conservative estimate I know of pegs the number of species at about 8 billion; the upper limit is somewhere around 80 billion. Since we know that floodists believe that all sediment prior to the K/T boundary is flood sediment, and floodists have offered an estimate of how much water was involved, we can calculate the estimated silt density of the floodwaters.It turns out that it's not silty water, it's more like runny mud. Your flood is a mile-thick mudpie. Freshwater species won't survive. They need to be on the Ark.

18 million wasn't my number.Hres a thought though. If it is 8 billion, divide that into the amount of years scientists think earth was around 4.6 bilion, and you get almost 2 new species every year appearing. Do we see that?

Actually since life hasn't been here for the whole 4.6 gyrs it would be more like 3 per year.I think the 8 billion number is high if you only work with multicellular creatures but a few species per year sounds like a low number. A very low number.The estimate is that a spieces lasts about 5 million years. ( I think that is based on the fossil record so it would not include single celled examaples.)If our current diversity is the norm and we have 10 to 100 million multicellular organisms here now then we would get from 2 to 20 turning over a year. That seems very low considering the tendancy of things to evolve when there is any selective pressure at all.And it is still a very small number on a percentage basis too.

Agreed - that is a rather low number. You can cause speciation of fruit flies in a couple years just in a lab by applying selective pressure (see Dobzhansky, Th., and O. Pavlovsky, 1971. "An experimentally created incipient species of Drosophila", Nature 23:289-292); how many "labs" does the entire earth cover?

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Easily.

I knew that, but didn't go there.So if so many of these are happening, are we witnessing it?

Yes and no.Do you think we would see all of 2 or three species of beetle appearing when we haven't even counted them all yet?We see speciation and new species arising. Even if we watched every birth of every organism it would be hard to draw the species line precisely. It isn't a 100% yes or no thing.There are a few billion multi cellular organisms on the planet. They are all a bit or a lot different form each other. Some can succssfully interbreed almost all of the time, some not so much, some rarely and some not at all. As the relationships change we get more and/or different species. You tell me how we'd catch them in the actual act of appearing.There have been examples given. It is happening. The exact rate isn't known any more than the actual number of species is known very well.I suppose one could try to figure out from what has been observed and the number of places we have looked and the total number of existing organisms what the figure would be. It would be pretty rough though.Given what is seen, the speed with which some species have popped up and the changes in the environment a few (or even 100's) of new species a year isn't out of line.What woud you estimate the number to be?

riVeRraT writes:

quote:

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I feel as though if it rained hard enough to flood the earth, provided there was enough water, that the water over land would still be fresh water, and higher than sea level, because it would be draining back to the sea.

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OK, here's a chance for you to use that "common sense" of yours:You do realize that your last statment is ridiculous, yes? "Drain back to the sea"? And what is keeping it from draining back into the sea immediately? The earth is currently not flooded globally. We have dry land.If we were to condense all the water suspended in the atmosphere to liquid, it would only have a single inch of depth. But it would immediately rush to the sea and we'd still have plenty of dry land we'd need to cover.In other words, it is physically impossible to flood the earth given only the water that currently exists on the earth at the time. It's already at the lowest point and the land reaches above that level. If you take water away from the oceans and pour it onto the land, it immediately rushes right back to the oceans and you're left with dry land again.The only way to flood a planet that has significant dry land is to add water from outside the planet.This, of course, leads to two questions:1) Where did this extra-terrestrial water come from?
2) Where did it go?But, of course, all of this is tangential to the original question:If we have the ark, where is it?

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

No rhain, if what I am saying has any truth to it, I mean I really don't know, its just a thought based on what I see around where I live.I live on a very steep mountain of about 500ft. If we get a rain storm here of just 4" in one day, then the entire hill floods. The water not only pours down the streams, it starts coming out of the ground everywhere.
If you could picture the mountain as being a giant sponge. Once the sponge cannot hold anymore water it starts coming out from everywhere. I'm sure that the hydrostatic pressure under the ground must be intense, with 500ft of alttitude behind it. I have seen the water actually spray out of the cracks in my driveway. My driveway has a slope of about 30 degrees.
So this is only after only one day and 4" of rain.
What if something here in earths history caused the oceans to produce so much rain over the land, that the run-off couldn't keep up with the rain.
You say that it would immediatly drain off. But if you measured it, I think it takes about a day for the water to get from where I live to the sea, which is about40-50 miles from here. So you can see the potential for the water backing up. Just how much rain would be required for this to happen to biblical proportions, I do not know.
I wish I could make a computer model of what I am saying to cleary show you guys.

Well one place we could look is at deseases in humans, and the rate at which they pop-up.I wonder why its only the simple life forms that pop up so rapidly. Besides of the obvious answer of complexity.