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Zarathustra wrote
My arithmetic puts Noah's ark at 1,518,750 cubic feet.
According to one source there are 1,589,361 unique species of insects, plants, animals, and avians we know of today. That's to say nothing of other varieties of life on earth: bacteria or viruses. But we can assume for the sake of argument that there was bacteria on the hull and that Shem caught the flue that month.
Now, I'm going to take the species as being the smallest unit of "kind" to which the bible refers, because if we do not then we must account for existing species which were not on the ark. Which would mean admitting speciation. And we can't do that because it would be tantamount to admitting evolution, right?
Granting that the bible is inerrant, when Jehovah orders Noah to take "two of every kind" into the ark he must necessarily have boarded 3,178,722 life forms, male and female.
This puts the amount of space for each life form in the ark at less than half a cubic foot. Any way you want to slice that half a foot still is no less a crunch. Even when you account for most being insects. Then you have to store enough food for all of those creatures to last 40 days. How about the carnivores? Do you pack extra animals in there to feed them? |
This is a very serious question for the literalists, but it is also fairly common. Theists will opine that the animals brought onto the Ark were mating pairs and that they left embryos rather than stay aboard themselves.
Another question has to do with the ventilation system.
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Genesis wrote
A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above;
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According to the Book, there was a single window of size 1-cubit x 1-cubit as the only opening in the whole ship. In order to bring in enough breathable air for all the animals and people would require a small jet engine.
