Existence of Noah's Ark

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

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

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."

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."

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I handily admit that I am not a physicist.

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Then I am not interested in what you have to say, you are a waste of my time.

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Oh, now that is just rich, coming from a person who continually insults "jerk scientists" and claims that "common sense" will give you the right solutions, despite failing every test that has been put before him on the associated thread.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

RiverRat: If we're to cross-reference your "20 feet" common sense, we'll need more data. First off, how structurally sound it is, is highly dependant on the mass of the animals inside, which also changes the number of decks and the amount of load the decks need to support (which further change the required structural strength). So, what is the mass of the animals, and how is their mass distributed among different decks?Secondly, cypress wood isn't going to be your structural limitation; pitch is. You'd be very lucky to get a shear strength of 200 kpa with pitch, compared to 5000-10000 kpa for most softwoods (like cypress).Are you going to grace us with a common sense number for how long you think it would take to drain Lake Mead, so we can prove it wrong using that thing you seem to hate - "science"?

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

I want a "common sense" number from you; my goal is to prove to you that common sense, which you keep relying on for your arguments, completely fails on complex problems.BTW, does anyone here have Maple? I'm doing the "Hoover dam" problem right now, and there's an integral that I'd rather not have to dig out my old calculus books to have to figure out how to solve This message has been edited by Rei, 09-27-2004 06:58 PM

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

If you're not relying on "common sense" for your solutions, then what are you relying on? Because you keep supporting theories on some incredibly complex problems.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

You certainly did support a hypothesis based only on your "common sense". As common sense generally fails in complex problems, and as you don't have even a fraction of the data that you'd need, people are having serious problems with your methodology.Look, I'm just looking for you to concede that people who know what they're doing stand to have a far, far better chance of getting the correct answer than someone who is just guessing based on things that they know next to nothing about. If you'll concede this, we can move on to discussing the problem at hand.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

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Since the earth is 75% water, and 25% land. You would need only to lower the oceans a little less than 7feet to cover the land with 20 feet of water.

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1. I thought creationists typically viewed the several *Miles* of sediment layers as having been layed during this time. Please postulate a model in which several *miles* worth of land are layed down during a flood that covers the entire earth (remembering that water generally flows downhill).2. 20 feet of water won't do anything in rugged territory.3. The ark ended up on Mt. Ararat, remember?4. 7 feet of water being removed from the oceans and into the atmosphere right before the flood? Lets do the math. 360 million square kilometers of oceans. Lets say that we're dealing with 2 1/2 meters by 350 million kilometers meters squared. That's 875000 cubic kilometers of water, or 8.75e17 kilograms of water. This would be added directly to Earth's atmospheric pressure, with is 5.1e18kg. So, just to get your 7 feet of oceanwater into the air at any given time, you would increase the entire earth's atmospheric pressure by a third.However, it's not that simple. For one, the water vapor will not enter the atmosphere like that without a significant influx of heat. As long as it is in the atmosphere (at least it would be in the leadup to the flood, right?), it would have to bear that heat.In short, try and go much beyond 7 feet, and you have to turn the earth into a literal pressure cooker. Try and inbalance your influx of water vapor, too, and regions of earth become extra-intense pressure cookers.By the way. Would you care to address:1) Megatsunamis2) Thermal issues related to mineral formation the world-over (many reactions are exothermic, after all - like concrete forming - and we're talking *miles* of sediment). Thermal issues from sediment bendinf and fracturing (ever felt an iron rod that has just been bent? Picture that happening to the *entire surface of Earth*.)3) Interspersed volcanic layers - essentially *always* in proportionally thin sheets like form on land - whose heat of formation would easily boil off all water on Earth4) Deposits of things that don't deposit in moving-water conditions - footprints, dunes, eggshells, unsnapped plant matter, delicate animal bones, etc - and things that don't deposit underwater at all - alternating layers of salt and water-insoluable minerals, for example, which are only regional - and things that clearly would take ages to deposit, such as huge layers composed of diatom and plankton remains.5) The sorting (noone ever answers this one! And it's the reason why the early bible-literalist geologists reluctantly tossed the flood story in the first place (for several floods... and then more floods... and eventually, they had to ditch the whole flood idea altogether).6) The fact that fitting of all "kinds" into the ark using very broad "kinds" (family-level or so) requires that morphological features evolve, then their owners die off, and then the exact same morphological features evolve again in the fossil record after the flood; while narrow kinds (genus or species level) requires an ark of ridiculous scale.7) The justification for excluding hard-to-keep things, such as freshwater fish, corals (shallow, gentle water are generally a requirement, due to their delicate and sun-dependant structure), and river dolphins (or did these evolve after the flood, too? That would be an interesting discussion ), from the ark - and hard to keep things, such as leaf-cutter ants and their fungal colonies, ants that farm aphids,etc (did all of these diets and behaviors evolve after the flood?).8) The simple comparison between animal-density capabilities at zoos vs. the proposed density for even the most "broad kind" ark proposals being, to put it plainly, astronomically different. Zoos don't pack animals in close in non-ventilated areas with poor sanitation for good reason and everything eating dried food for no reason, you know9) The shipbuilding aspects; the largest wooden ships in the world (still smaller than the proposed ark) required large iron or steel reinforcements, and despite being built by teams of over a hundred people with far superior technology and resources at their disposal, sometimes had problems with the ships starting to rot on the docks before their construction was completed.ack.... I should stop, otherwise, I'll go on for pages.....This message has been edited by Rei, 09-28-2004 06:39 PM

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

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2. 20 feet of water if level wouldn't do anything in rugged territory, but if it rained 20 feet of water per day, it would..

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No, it wouldn't. Picture here:How is 20 feet of water going to stay up on the top? The only possible way is if rain was coming in faster than the speed at which it would flow off there. The speed it would flow off there at the lowest point in the water is sqrt(2*g*d), so rounding 20 feet=6 meters, that's sqrt(2*9.8*6)=10.8 meters per second (that's *before* it starts to fall). Please, postulate how you'll overcome such a loss rate with new influx.

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It ened up in the mountains of Ararat, not on a mountain neccesaraly.

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Still higher than it started, wouldn't you say?

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you may have a very valid point there. I did not realize that the pressure of the earth's atmosphere would change if all that water was added. But, the whole 7 feet of ocean would not be added at the same time. The cycle has to start somewhere, and I think you would need only 4' of ocean in the atmosphere at any given time.

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And how quickly are you assuming that it's raining? 4" of ocean -> 8" of rain. Unless the water is moving in at mach speed, that rain is going to be out of the atmosphere in no-time-flat in your flood scenario. Do we need to add megahurricanes to our list of disasters that will kill Noah in a heartbeat?

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I also am not claiming to know the component to who it happened only that if it did, there would be enough water here on earth to flood the earth.

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Only if it is magically held to the surface by the hand of God on every point on Earth.

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If I had to think about it, and I have. I would say the oceans would have to heat up quite a bit for this to happen. Then if the land is cooler, thats where the water would condense or rain.

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I already showed you that even just 6 feet of ocean water increase earth's pressure by about 30% (and that there will be a dramatic increase in temperature to keep it suspended, although I didn't have the time to calculate it). Furthermore, as it rains, you're going to be releasing a *lot* of potential energy. How much? Assume that the average raindrop has to fall 100 meters. Assuming 1 centimeter of rain falls per second (the "total flood" scenario). In every square meter of land, every second, you would have 10 kg of water fall 100 meters. PE=mgh, so 10*9.8*100=9800 joules of energy per second: With Nowhere To Go. The energy of 10 100 watt lightbulbs on every meter of the planet, with their heat going nowhere except into the air and ground. Not only would this make such a rainfall rate physically impossible (the rain would re-vaporize long before hitting the ground with such a release rate), but it would parbroil the planet (along with poor Noah).

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Scientists always say there isn't enough water on the earth for the flood to happen, I am just proving them wrong, IF I am right.

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You have yet to postulate exactly *what* is stopping the water from flwoing into a state of lower potential energy - and *FAST* (v=sqrt(2*g*d)).

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1. What does "Megatsunamis" have to do with it?

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I'll assume from this that you don't know what a megatsunami is.Tsunamis are caused by earthquakes. Since there is a practical limit to how far the plates will move at once, tsunamis are limited to about a dozen meters or so in height.However, this view of tsunamis was to change, on August 9, 1958, when a powerful earthquake rocket Lituya Bay in Alaska:See that light colored area that looks like beach? That is over *500 meters high* in places. When the quake struck, it triggered a huge landslide into the water. The displaced water created a truly massive wave, the likes of which had not been scientifically documented in history prior. This is a megatsunami.Far worse than Lituya bay is known, however. Volcanic islands around the world show evidence of huge landslides in which a sizable part of the entire island fell into the ocean. Such landslides are not a thing of the past. Of special concern is the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. In an eruption earlier this century, the western half of the island started to collapse, and then caught itself. When it goes, its wave is expected to take out the entire eastern seaboard of the United States, in places reaching as far as 60 kilometers inland.Now, picture an amount of water mass moving at heights and speeds that make the La Palma look like a grain of sand, the world over, colliding with each other regularly. Even deep water won't save you in such a situation.

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3. Again I am not sure how this would affect what I am saying. Its my ignorance, I know, just bare with me.

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This is tied to #1 of part 1; if you don't believe that the layers of sediments were layed down during the flood, then this is irrelevant to your case.

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4. Are you trying to say that the flood, if it happened would wash away all these things?

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See above.

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5. Sorting?

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Yes. This is still applicable to your case, even if you don't take the standard creationist viewpoint. Why are all fossils "sorted" in a particular pattern, the world over? For example, every Gigantopithicus has a very narrow range of layers it can exist in. You *never* find a non-vaulted burial of a modern human skeleton in the same layer with a gigantopithicus. Grasses are only in recent sediments. Trilobytes are only on old sediments. Etc. Every fossil has a very narrow range of layers it can exist in, even if the fossil is widespread throughout the whole planet.Furthermore, this sorting occurs irrespective of general physical characteristics (size, shape, mass, etc), but only with respect to transitioning morphological characteristics. This is the very reason why early geologists - who were creationist, mind you - had to give up the Great Flood theory. They then adopted a theory of "multiple floods", and then keep adding more and more floods in, until they eventually had to give it up.

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7. Fresh water fish could survive in the conditions I am saying.

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Um, no they couldn't. They'd be swept into saline conditions in no time. Plus, many freshwater species are temperature-dependant, they're often very diet-dependant, and sometimes incredibly reproduction-location-specific. I mean, heck, the mere act of *damming a river* can kill off fish populations like crazy, and drive them extinct in the rivers involved if left untreated.

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Plus if God wanted them to, they would.

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Look, if you just want to say "Goddunnit", that's fine, but don't try and abuse real physics in the process.

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Again, I am only addressing the water issue.

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Fair enough.This message has been edited by Rei, 09-30-2004 07:33 PMThis message has been edited by Rei, 09-30-2004 07:35 PM

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Instead of asserting, do the math, why don't you?PE=mgh.
g=9.8 m/s
m=1 kg (a sample)
h=~50 meters
490 joules
Specific heat of water=4186 joules/kg
Q=c*m*dT
490=4186*1*dT
dT=4186/490
~0.11 degrees celcius***HOWEVER***Rivers always - and especially in freefall - exchange significant amounts of heat to the atmosphere. In fact, waterfalls often have a net *cooling* effect on the water (with a net heating effect on the atmosphere) due to this. The greater the cross-section of the waterfall and the lower the volume, the more heat will be lost (because the water tends to break into smaller droplets with more surface area). Very tall waterfalls often barely impact the ground, having lost much of their water to the atmosphere during the drop (for example, Angel Falls).In industry, cooling towers are often used, by having a heated liquid have water flow by it to cool it down, and having the heated water then be dropped from a height and collected at the bottom.The heat dissipation is not the case, as I'm sure you can see, for a global flood. Namely, because the atmosphere can't dissipate the heat that the water gives it.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

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I hope you too realize that I amnot claiming that the earth remained flooded after the rain stopped

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Yeah... because that would mean that you believe literally in the bible.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

The bible says the waters stuck around for 150 days. so you're contradicting the bible. Furthermore, you keep skipping over the fact that the water in valleys will be moving at hundreds of miles per hour toward the sea (and the more water you put on it, the faster it moves). I've given you the formula several times; in case you need it again, it is v=sqrt(m*g*d)Concerning megatsunamis: Can you not see the fact that dumping billions of metric tons of water on mountainsides is the same as if billions of metric tons of rock collapsed, in terms of wave-forming ability?

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Lets see, if the flood happened the way I am saying, the sediment would be lostly washed out to the oceans, and plains. I guess by studying the sediment, we could see if this was possible.

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And, I already mentioned that fossils are sorted without regard to size, shape, density, etc. Furthermore, there are miles of sediment in places onland. Sorry.

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This may very well prove my thought wrong. I don't know. Have we ever dug for fossils in the ocean?

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Of course. People have dug for fossils everywhere.

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I guess the kind of flooding I am talking about would mix up the layers. Maybe the only way to really see is to simulate it?

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Nah. Even minor floods mix up surface layers like crazy.

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Mud slides happen all the time, we never see mixing of fossil layers in these areas of the world. Places like Honduras, where hurricanes like Mitch wiped out entire villages with 8 feet of mud? That was some serious rainfall.

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And those 8 feet of mud are highly scrambled. In the fossil record, mudslides generally come across as a single layer..Most of the rest of things seemed to be "I don't know", so I don't think I need to bother responding to them. I already did the calculations on how much heat would be released on rainfall - from only 100 meters of altitude, 1 cm/sec of rainfall releases as much energy as 10 100 watt lightbulbs in every square meter, with nowhere for the energy to go. It's like wrapping a space heater in a blanket, except even worse (a blanket isn't nearly as insulating as a huge canopy of water vaper hovering over the entire earth).

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Buz:Hold a rock that weighs one ounce in your hand, that measures 3.5 centimeters tall. Hold a piece of cork that weighs one ounce in your hand that measures 7 centimeters tall.Which is heavier?It doesn't matter how high up/how spread out the atmosphere is. It's all still there, so it's all still pushing down on you, unless the hand of God is holding it up. The pressure at the base of a column of fluid is based solely on how much mass of fluid is above you, not how tall the volume of fluid is (air is a compressible fluid). It's Bernoulli's Law, and is critical in designing everything on the planet earth that humans use that involves high-pressure fluids (dams, pipes, refining, etc).As for your "gravity changing" proposal, are you proposing a change of gravity on just Earth, or the universe as a whole?

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."