Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study
or
Sailing with sauropods
To start out, I reviewed what Scripture actually teaches about what kinds of creatures were taken on the Ark in order to dispel the oft-repeated charge that the Ark needed to carry perhaps 50 million species of creatures. I then figured out how many animals were on the Ark, arriving at approximately 16,000. Since animals vary so much in size, a numerical figure itself is not too informative. Therefore, the 16,000 animals were assigned into body-weight categories. As a result, there were eight logarithmic categories spanning the hummingbird (a few grams each) and the largest dinosaur (nearly 100 tons when adult). Since most of the animals were small, the median animal on the Ark was about the size of a rat.
I also showed how the dietary needs of vampire bats, king cobras, certain highly-folivorous primates, and three-toed sloths could have been met on the Ark.
It turns out that simple labor-saving techniques could have enabled eight people to care for 16,000 rat-sized animals assuming the availability of only rustic tools, along with a 10-hour day, 6-day week, with time to spare.
...when we look at all these anti-Ark arguments, we note a conspicuous lack of scholarly response to most of them...
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