Noahs ark is a physical impossibility

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Buzsaw writes:
When I was born in 1935, color digital data flying through thin air would've been considered supernatural as well as space ships flying through space, and to the moon.

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Interesting. So then, you recognize that color data transmission and space travel aren't in fact supernatural? And that if you had thought that at the time, you would have been wrong? And if you had known what you know now (that space travel is a natural phenomenon) and had seen others in error, you might have labored to help them overcome their ignorance?Then perhaps you might understand why us evolutionists come to boards like this to challenge preconceptions that smack of superstitious dogma rather than evidence-supported, naturalist theories. Certainly much about the world around us was thought to be supernatural. That doesn't mean it is. That doesn't even mean that if we can't explain it, it must be supernatural. The history of science implies the opposite.Ok, sorry, off-topic. Just thought I'd respond. Here's a question for the Arkists: Assuming you're right about only needing two of every "kind" (whatever a kind is) instead of two of every species, how many kinds is that? And from those kinds, how can we get as many species as we see today without assuming rates of speciation that even an evolutionary biologist would be hard-pressed to accept?It's a "dammed if you do, dammned if you don't" situation - if you have few enough "kinds" to fit in a boat of any possible size then you don't have enough individuals to lead to the number of species we have today. If you assume enough "kinds" for a more reasonable rate of speciation then the boat has to be of impossible size.------------------
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I think it's species-ism of the worst kind to assume that the ark contained only land vertabrates. As others have addressed, you're going to need aquariums for all "kinds" of fish, as well - the flood waters are going to be too salty for freshwater fish but too fresh for saltwater fish.Not to mention the insects, which constitute the bulk of Earth's species. If you honestly believe that you could go from two members of a "kind" to the variety of species we see, consider the beetles. The ark story demands that, from a pair of beetles, we would get the 400,000 known species of beetles we see today, within a time frame of 4500 years. That's around 100 species a year - a rate that, if true, we could easily see today.You'd have to accept irrational levels of evolution to accept any practical (in terms of shipbuilding) model of the ark story. I don't see how such a story could be accepted by creationists, given their stance on speciation, etc. But I guess if you demand an inerrant Bible that's the kind of contradiction you have to accept...Oh, and consider that "genetic superiority" must be taken in context of environment. So an animal that was adapted to boat travel (i.e. being stationary for a long, long time, eating hardly at all, not coming into heat, etc.) would be genetically superior for that one year, but as soon as it stepped onto dry land it would be massively misadapted to the new environment and therefore unable to propagate.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that the 4500 years (calculated from lineages after Noah, I assume - I'm no Biblical scholar) might in fact represent a lot more time? Could be, I guess, but we're talking time multiplication of a factor of a thousand or more to have enough time for all the "kinds" on the ark to sufficiently speciate at the rate we observe speciation today. It's in the ocean. If the hypothetical floodwaters rose high enough to "cover the Earth", then surely they would mix with the ocean. Considering that the ocean (at least these days) is far deeper than the height of any mountain, I think it's safe to assume that oceanic water would constitute a sizable majority of flood waters. Saltwater ocean life in general has a low tolernace for changes in salinity. Coral, for instance, would be killed simply by the change in depth from the flood. That would more or less kill the planet's ecosystem, because the coral reef zones are the major source of oxygen (through the action of phytoplankton). Unless Noah takes some coral (unlikely, because coral is difficult to transport alive even with our technology), the flood kills the planet. And it would take a million years to generate full-fledged coral ecosystems from a founding population.Now, if you postulate that the oceans were a lot smaller before the flood, you're still faced with an ocean ecology that couldn't survive the transition to larger, saltier oceans. Only if you ignore the time scale. You're talking about some 2 - 100 million current species from about a hundred or a thousand "kinds" (whatever a kind is) in a space of less than 5000 years. That's at least 400 new and very different species every year. And that's a pretty conservative estimate. That would be something so noteworthy it would have been recorded by every civilization, including the writers of the Bible. As well as something we would see today.On the other hand, all those species over one billion years of evolution? Only 1 new species every 10 years. Obviously it doesn't work out that evenly, but it's a much more reasonable model.Obviously the ark scenario would be a bottleneck event of cosiderable damage and magnatude. It's doubtful that the Earth's ecosystems would survive. Noah and his animals would perish of asphixiation and starvation after they got off the ark, assuming they survived the trip (which as others have made the point, would be impossible.)------------------
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So, instead, what we have is evidence AGAINST the flood story, leaving many people to reject the literal truth of the bible? Why is that better?Better that the flood story was never in the bible, because it's pretty clear that it didn't happen that way.

Hrm, interesting - so, if all modern canine species are decended from a wolf-like proto-canine, post-flood; and all fossils are the result of flood activity and sedimentation; then why do we find fossils of species that your model says wouldn't have existed until after the flood?