Peez

Yup, and then Noah grew food for all the animals in that fertile poop. It's obvious, once you stop thinking.


Peez

Dr.GH

Heh, heh.

I see that socrates has now mentioned honey as a food preservation method. Good to know that he reads more than just AiG, and ICR crap.

Oolon Colluphid

Okay, so what did the pests eat then?

Hmm. Dried foods. Hay. Yep, that’d work for the ungulates. But, erm, doesn’t hay get mouldy? Air-tight containers for bales of hay... yup, that’s plausible.

And, um, so what did the bot-flies and the screw-worms eat?

Anteaters and aardwolves... were the termites dried, or salted? Oh I see, there were dozens of live colonies on board...

And it’s just occurred to me: no matter how generous the rations, rations is what the critters must have been on. So what happens when they breed? Now this may not be a problem for pandas, but how did Noah stop the rodents breeding? There’s a pair of everything, remember, so the ark would have contained rather more animals at the end than it started with. How did he feed the burgeoning population? A quick abracadabra with loaves and fishes, perhaps? So, what, halfway through the voyage, he says ‘sorry, gotta cut the rations unless you lot stop fucking?’

I was wondering why no human babies came ashore too, after all, husbands and wives, cooped up together, gotta relieve the tedium somehow (surely they weren’t celebate all that time, and no contraception...).

But then, they were probably too knackered. Didn’t we do a calculation some time of the care-time involved? Something like this:

Call the number of kinds 4000 (surely a bit generous).

Say there’s 10 humans on board (Noah, three sons, plus wives each, plus two for the pot). 400 kinds each to look after.

Suppose just 5 mins care required each day (less for rats and the hibernating ones, rather more for elephants, horses etc, and anyone’s guess what care Argentinasaurs needed).
400 x 5 = 2000 minutes. That, folks, is a 33 hour day.

Okay, what if they slept for just four hours a night? That leaves a 20 hour day, non-stop, or 1200 minutes. Which, rather neatly, gives each kind (of the mere 4000 on board) 3 minutes of care a day. Including moving between pens, fetching the food from the storage areas and uncorking the airtight tubs it’s stored in.

I doubt they had time for a pee, let alone to procreate.

Okay, let’s come at this another way. Let’s be more sensible. Suppose, again, ten people. Suppose they need to sleep, eat, pee and poo.
Sleep: 6 hours a day. Don’t forget they’d’ve been working hard.
Eating: 1 hour for all meals, including preparation and clearing away.
Pee and poo: half an hour. Generous, but put a bit of the spare time towards general communications, organisation and management. They’ve got to know what they’re up to, who’s on washing up duty etc.

So, 7.5 hours taken out of the working day, leaving a 16.5 hour working day.

Now, suppose that an average ‘kind’, in practice, requires 10 minutes a day, to cover all eventualities: cleaning out, feeding, mopping up sick, moving the food within the sea-tossed ark, opening those Tupperware boxes, etc. How many ‘kinds’ were plausibly on the ark?

Well, 16.5 hours is 990 minutes. Divided by 10 = 99 kinds each; ten people therefore could sensibly look after 990 kinds. At one hell of a push.

How many mammal genera are there? How many terrestrial (or otherwise needed-to-be-on-the-ark) families are there?

Cheers, Oolon

Boro Nut

Funnilly enough, it became a method of food preservation at exactly the same time as refrigeration and desication. Isn't that an amazing coincidence? To be precise, roughly around about the dawn of time.

Boro Nut

doghouse

Properly made hay will last several years as long as it's kept dry.

Peez

Although food preservation on long voyages was, until recently, difficult, it was nevertheless, in principle, possible. To play devil's (god's?) advocate

Simply drying food is very effective for preservation. Salt (when you can get it) and sugar (in honey) can also help to preserve food. How one might keep the atmosphere in the arc dry is anyone's guess, but it could easily have been cool and this would have helped (much like a root cellar). Boiled food in wax-sealed jars would be almost like cans (can you prove that they couldn't do that? ).

Then they could have collected ice that was freed from the ice caps, and made a large cold room. Of course, they could continue to fish from the arc and even harvest edible seaweed.


While I agree that food preservation on the arc is yet another problem for the Noah fairy tale, I don't think that it is worth persuing. It is harder to establish, and there are plenty of other obvious problems with the story (if you will excuse the understatement). If you do wish to go after it, don't forget to work on specific dietary needs (the lack of vitamin C got to many sailors long before they were in danger of starvation).

Maybe water is worth a go as well. I know that rainwater could be collected, but just how much water are those thousands of animals going to drink every day? Given the size of the arc, a lot of rain would be required. Not only that, but a lot of that water is going to end up, um, discarded by the animals. Even if the flood water could be drunk (which would mean that most marine organisms would die), that is a lot of water being brought aboard. Who has bilge duty today?

It is just so stupid, it is sad that we are even discussing it.

Peez

Blinn

sorry

Calzaer

When it's raining at a rate approaching 100 inches/hour, I'd imagine it's tough to keep stuff dry.