Bonobo, you are so stuck in your past, you can't see the current discussion.
1. Tell me anywhere in the Bible that says what Noah's occupation was. It certaintly wasn't goatherder, that is your ignorant predjudice talking. The Bible only talks about him being spoken to by God, raising three sons, building the Ark, surviving the flood, sending the birds, building an altar and sacrificing, planting a vinyard and getting drunk. (NT also mentions him preaching)
2. Your predjudice colors your expectations of materials available, in at least two areas. First, throughout this discussion, you, John, and others, have repeatedly claimed Noah didn't have iron to use. That is blatantly FALSE. Two chapters ahead of the Ark project, we find a craftsman in the family line of Cain called Tubal-Cain, 6th generation from Adam(i.e. Noah's great granduncle, 6 times removed). Genesis 4:22 " And as for Zillah, she also bore Tubal-Cain, an instructor of every craftsman in bronze and IRON. ..."
Secondly, we find in the previous verse(21) Tubal-Cain's brother Jubal described as "the father of all those who play the harp and flute". While many musical instruments can be very primitive, they also can become rapidly very sophisticated. I would use this to challenge your claim they could have had no adhesives.
3. You continually confuse your picture of human timelines over the biblical timeline that includes the Ark. By the nature of the unique destructive nature of the global Cataclysm known as the Noah's Flood, ALL prior human cultural evidences were wiped from the face of the earth, with only a few possible exceptions(I will not discuss that last part under this topic). Thus, IF we are discussing the Biblical Ark as possible, it would seem relevant to use the Biblical timeline, which claims that ALL humans now living, and their cultures, descended from the Ark survivors, and spread from Babel across the earth, with a massive bottleneck at this point in time. Nothing really controversial there, IF you work it all within THIS framework. HISTORY only dates from writing, and that dates from Mesopotamia. I don't care if you call it 4500 years ago, 10,000 years ago, or however long you want to torture the biblical dating, ALL the relevant archaeological cultural and technological growth patterns fall AFTER eight people get off the Ark and proceed to restart civilization. The children and g-()-grandchildren of these eight people built Babel, Egypt, the 7 wonders of the world, they built the Megalithic structures with stones WE can't move, with fitting tolerances we STILL can't match on that scale. People scattering across the landscape for the first few generations after Babel would be in a technological black hole, reduced to living in caves, hunting for animals, following the herds, finding new sources of ores and minerals to even BEGIN to rebuild whatever they could pass on to their children.
What knowledge did they have before that was lost? Compare this to the corrupted text of Gilgamesh, a several generations later ruler/hero who claims to have met the man who built the Ark, then wrote down his version in an epic tale format, as secondary to his own adventures. This 'ruler' didn't even previously know the specifics he claimed to have written down from Noah. It was information that was not passed down through the generations (By the way, if you thing riding the Noah's ark was rough, what would it have been like to ride it out in the 9 story tall CUBE Gilgamesh claimed??? I believe (referencing earlier posts in this thread, he would have been wearing more beer that he drank). How many on this thread sucessfully pass All the info they know to their children? Especially if they are hard-headed, think they know it all, and see no evidence of the 'golden world' their forebearers describe.
4. You are still stuck in your rut talking about a backbone(keel), which links to your powered ships that act like a bundle of reeds. The rest of the thread is talking about a box/girder/slab-sided construction in an UNpowered craft. Your 'instincts' are failing you like an earth-raised person trying to run on the Moon. You are trying to stay with box-kite airplanes in a spruce-goose world with monocoque construction and cantilevered wings. You have potentially helpful knowledge to add to the research for possibilities, but you do nothing but harp on misconceptions you have been told several times are completely incorrect for this particular project.
Go look at barns and houses built centuries ago, and still standing through floods and earthquakes. They usually only fail when the foundation goes, or minimal maintenance is not kept up. Check on the farm-building techniques of 200 years ago, when they knew how to season wood under water for one winter or more before using it, built houses and mills with single families, and occasional help from neighbors, even building barns of timber that would easily match the size of the Ark.
http://www.chc.state.ct.us/sloanestanleymuseum.htm Check out the truss bridges that are standing, and working, from nearly a century ago or are still being built, such as:
http://www.siouxnarrowsbridge.org/history.htmlOr
The resource cannot be found. with the new longest span of 71 meters! I think it's very interesting how this come so close to those 'numbers' your opponents are 'throwing around' in this thread.
5. You ask for numbers, stress calculations, experiments, etc, however, when someone provides them to you, you just storm off in a ranting hissy fit, NEVER acknowledging any progress on the part of the person providing the numbers, muttering "Besides the fact that there is no evidence on the earth of a world wide Delude."
You are deluding yourself that you are 'scientific', flexible, adaptable to change, yet you cannot even begin to function within a simple alternate paradigm. Your current attitude would never suffer anyone else to be right, and the Ark would never float in your mind, even if it floated up right in front of your face.
Try this attitude for a change, adopting the STARTING point of this thread, HOW could it have been built, not how could you KEEP it from being built!
gBen
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