It is very difficult to envisage what I have posted... and I don't expect anyone to get it suddenly. I have given you some coordinates you might say, and it is up to you to be able to work with them, and to generate the results. You could use a computer and ask a hydrologist to help.
Noah's Ark
- Thread starter Mickmeister
- Start date
It is very difficult to envisage what I have posted... and I don't expect anyone to get it suddenly. I have given you some coordinates you might say, and it is up to you to be able to work with them, and to generate the results. You could use a computer and ask a hydrologist to help.
In other words....you don't know shit.
It would be wrong for me to say that you are incapable of understanding what I have sketched.
Because what you have sketched is wrong. Way wrong.
Explain what you think is wrong, and why you think that.
Hey, Mac. You're being generous. That would account for the immediate vicinity to be inundated, but some of these folks want to say that Everest was under water, and it's nearly 9000 m.
Any such mobility would have been a cataclysm that would have killed all life forms without the need for drowning them.
The motion you are proposing has no way to increase the mean sea level to +8846 m, the amount required to cover Mt Everest.
Let's talk about volume. For a sphere, V = (4/3) π r³.
Earth radius = 6378 km, V = 1.08678129254289E+21 m³
Earth+Everest radius = 6386.848 m³, V = 1.09131054315458E+21 m³
difference = vol. of water req'd = 4529250611688110000 m³
Where does this water come from? It has to be added to the water already abounding in the oceans, lakes and rivers, no matter how you shake it or bake it.
Of course it's just a myth, and it's silly to be taken to task to calculate this, but, as I said before, numbers are our friends.
The Bible said it rained for forty days and nights. Divide by 40 and you get:
V = 113231265292203000 m³ / day.
Another way to think of this is that every single point on earth was standing under a column of evaporated water which, upon condensing, would reach 8848 m to the top of Everest. In each of those 40 days, 221 m of water have had to have condensed and fallen on every point on the planet. It's of course impossible for more reasons than we've begun to discuss. Maybe these numbers will help you a little to begin to get your arms around the physical impossibility of such a nutty idea.
Let's begin with the notion that every square meter of the planet supported a column of 8848 m of evaporated water. Ignoring the impossibility, let's calculate the impossible pressure bearing down on the world before the impossible condensation would have had to have taken place. It's so huge a pressure that everything would have had to have been crushed, and there would be no need for a flood. Poor Noah (Utnapishtim, of course, from the earlier myth) and all his impossible collection of life forms would have been crushed. Even if they all were wearing Iron Man suits, they couldn't support the weight. 8848 m³ of water x 1,000 kg / m³ = 8.8 million kg per sq meter of pressure. That's about 867 times the atmospheric pressure. In other words, it's like being near the bottom of the Marianas trench without a pressure vessel. It's almost 6 times the pressure at the Macondo well where BP couldn't send people in a bathysphere. Imagine, if you couldn't join some pipe under 1/6th the pressure in a bathysphere how hard it would be to undertake to build a wooden ship the size of the Titanic, much less to round up even your own herd, which is millions of species less than the total roundup, and to do all of this at 6 times the pressure at Macondo. Imagine being exposed without a protective bathysphere under 867 atmospheres, even if all you had to do was sing "What a Mighty Fortress in Our God" (in Akkadian, of course). Every living cell would simply implode and no work would get done and there would be nothing left to round up.
And, of course, the last few tons of water evaporating into the air from the impossible nonexistent water source would have had to have overcome 867 atmospheres to evaporate in the first place. It's so ludicrous that I can only dream of meeting all the people in the world who believe this, only so I can sell them shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. And if you actually believe this, Gerhard Kemmerer, then I've got a bridge for sale for you, too.
When we get to the temperatures at which the last ton of water would have needed to have been raised, to overcome the 867 atmospheres of pressure, we'll see that, besides being crushed, everything would have had to have been boiled. It remains to be seen what the wormwood of that sorry boat would have been reduced to. Probably limp cellulose. Somewhere inside might be some clumps of pulverized boiled bone tissue as the only evidence that people and animals were on board. And maybe some traces of hair, feathers and scales. I doubt if much of any other tissues would be recognizable. And of course all traces would have been dispersed in the torrent of water pouring down on the limp parboiled cellulose "boat", in an amount that would have been needed to raise the water level 221 m per day. The first rain drops would have had to have occurred at the peak of pressure, sometime after the temperature had dropped from parboil to who knows what. When we look at the critical temperature and pressure for water, we will discover that it simply is impossible to transition from vapor to liquid under any conditions that support this ludicrous belief.
To get a picture of what I'm talking about, imagine "sitting" near the bottom of the Marianas Trench with a balloon you've inflated to 867 atmospheres. Inside this balloon is a pot of water. You need to boil this water to make it evaporate. Let's calculate the temperature required to do so. (I'll leave that for a future exercise but I assure you it's far above the normal boiling point of water, so everything on Earth would have had to have been in a pressure cooker in order to get the evaporation to take place).
The impossible water source is the original 8848 m of water that was needed to fully evaporate in the impossibly hot climate only to hang suspended in the atmosphere as steam while Noah (Utnapishtim) was boat building the impossible boat that could hold the impossible menagerie collected during an impossible roundup. It says the Earth was flooded up past Everest before the story begins, i.e., all life appeared on Earth when it was a Water World, where the impossible Creation Myth paradoxically imposes a Garden of Eden and people running around uncircumcised, being bad and getting turned into impossible pillars of salt. All by impossible magic. Of course we could try to rewrite the story to make it take place in the impossible city of Atlantis which is actually more plausible if you at least get the Atlanteans to build an impossibly huge bathysphere over the city before it is submerged under the crush of 8848 m of water.
Plastic earth and relative viscosity have nothing on the absurdity of assuming Noah was working under 867 atmospheres, in a steam pressure cooker that miraculously chilled itself rapidly (within his putative lifetime) which was necessary to give the conditions before the rainfall, that is, that places like Canaan (Mesopotamia for Utnapishtim) -- the settings of the stories -- could ever be on dry ground. And for all of this to happen we can also try to calculate the impossibly huge energy transitions that would have to have had to have occurred, which exceed the available solar radiation from the sun during absorption, and the rate of heat dissipation through the atmosphere back out into empty space by radiation during condensation, even if the sun impossibly went dark in order to assist in getting the impossibly parboiled planet to cool down. Impossibly parboiled Noah was working in the impossibly dark planet building an impossible boat to carry an impossible menagerie after an impossible roundup, all in the dark, at 867 atmospheres of pressure, under an impossibly saturated sky loaded with moisture from an impossible earlier Water World.
I suppose you believe some bearded scribe in a robe and sandals was taking notes while all of this impossible stuff was going on. Of course he was Sumerian, not a Canaanite, and he used a stylus to poke cuneiform wedges into clay which he later baked in a kiln. That much we know for sure, and it's certainly within the realm of possibility. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's just about the only element of truth in this whole parade of ridiculous ideas.
Oh, no, it's very easy to envisage it, steam technology has been around a long time.
I dunno, when I was a kid I could never get my head around the idea of it having to rain for 40 days and 40 nights to flood the earth, yet it took just seven to create the whole of existence. He supposedly created the sun with the utterance of "Let there be light," so why not "Let there be water?"
Something about "mysterious ways" goes here...
Something about "mysterious ways" goes here...
Gerhard Kemmerer said:
The thread title in Noah's Ark, which is the Utnapishtim epic retold in the Canaanite context. In both cultures it was rain, not the impossible cataclysm you are speaking of, which caused the flood. In the Noah version, it's quite clear (if you're a fundamentalist) that the whole earth was inundated. This means we need rainfall surpassing Mt Everest, hence my post above.
Here we can calculate the amount of energy required to lift and propagate 8848 m of water over the entire surface of the earth. What you're proposing is to lift all the water off of the earth and hurl it sideways in a wall. This wall would be in the shape of a thin ring that encirles the entire sphere of the earth, rotates 360° and then magically falls back into place, without the fresh water being contaminated.
No earthquake can do that. No cataclysm of this kind took place during the existence of life on earth. If it had, all life would have been extinguished. But that's absurd; you're alive, I'm alive, Mac and Origin and everybody else, and all the plants and animals that are at this moment alive--we are all alive. No mass extinction ever occurred during the human era.
If you are wanting to allude to any one of several mass extinctions prior to the evolution of humans, that's another thing, and it couldn't include a man named Noah, nor his predecessor, Utnapishtim, nor the places and people that existed prior to those putative floods which are spoken of in those silly myths.
The prior mass extinctions did wipe out many genera, but they were obviously not complete, or else nothing would be alive today. There is no evidence that any wave ever washed over the Earth. That's a complete fabrication. The peaks of many mountains are not eroded as you suggest, in fact most often they are sharp and rugged, a fact clearly visible just by taking a plane trip.
A wall of water 8848 m high washing over the earth would have pushed boulders off of hills and mountains in a direction equal to the velocity vector of the wave. No such alignment of boulders exists. All forests would have been felled. Antarctica would be littered with logs, sand and gravel, which is obviously not the case. Sand from the Sahara and Gobi would have been washed away exposing the bedrock, and/or leaving behind salt lakes. The erosion of the Grand Canyon would have been altered by this wave, and the trench would have been filled with debris.
None of these things happened. No such evidence exists. There is abundant evidence that natural history proceeded without any such cataclysm. In any case it's an impossible amount of energy. Somewhere you mentioned talking to a hydrologist. I think you need to talk to a seismologist. You would also need to talk to a magician to get the water to leave every basin and arrange itself as a ring that rotates 360° then falls back in place, with fresh water uncontaminated. To get the age of creatures and the eras that life forms inhabited the earth, you can talk to just about any biologist. Geologists are generally quite knowledgeable about the geologic eras in which plants and animals were laid down and fossilized in the many layers of sediment that form our knowledge base about natural history.
Incidentally, the tops of the atolls where Darwin made his great discoveries would have been blown off by this wave. Presumably all sand and silt and loose rock would have been blown off the land and carried to the ocean basins, only to fill up the deepest regions like the Marianas Trench.
Another numbers challenge is to calculate the thickness of the impossible 8848 m ring of water that you are proposing. Or, if you like, you can try to dream up some other shape for the wave that circles the entire surface of a sphere. Once you decide on the geometry of this wave, we can calculate the thickness of the wall of water.
I like numbers. They keep us sane. They tell us what's within the realm of possibility and what's not. A global flood never happened. If it had, a whole lot of data would be available today pointing to it. But of course there is none. And of course not, since it's only a silly myth, and it couldn't possibly have actually happened, no matter how hard you wish it had.
Yeah, that's the catch-all phrase whenever anyone tries to apply facts and logic to irrational beliefs.
I remember wondering if His utterances were in Hebrew, who was there to hear these utterances, all made prior to the creation of any witnesses, and what it could mean to utter anything into a vacuum prior to the creation of air, vocal chords and ears. Not because I was wondering how these could happen, just that I was wondering how anyone could ever believe they were anything other than a silly old myth.
AqueousId,
I have not quoted your lengthy reply, but thanks for the details on volumes etc.
One of the basic errors in thinking, is that if the ocean were to cover the mountains, it needs to rise simultaneously all around the globe, like a steady outer sphere. This is where most people fail, because it is beyond kitchen sink hydrology.
Water on this scale does not have to do that because, as said earlier, the downward force of gravity overrides the sideways leveling tendencies.
Another aspect is that the oceans are not very deep by comparison to the globe, just a thin layer, which can be distributed over the profile of the earth.
I have heard all the arguements as you have posted and they are known by other creationists who make the mistake of trying to explain the flood using those principles.
That model alone, does not support the global flood.
A body of water covering the earth, not only shapes and keeps the land underneath down, it also tends to follow the contour of the world's profile, rather than rising as a smooth and even sphere of water.
Some of your statements are dramatic, which means you are actually beginning to visualise on a large scale.
What I found is that once you understand how powerful a large body of water is, you begin to see how it can do the job.
You don't need a giant tidal wave foaming at the top and so on, a slight and steady movement of the oceans, a couple of knots is unstoppable.
I have not quoted your lengthy reply, but thanks for the details on volumes etc.
One of the basic errors in thinking, is that if the ocean were to cover the mountains, it needs to rise simultaneously all around the globe, like a steady outer sphere. This is where most people fail, because it is beyond kitchen sink hydrology.
Water on this scale does not have to do that because, as said earlier, the downward force of gravity overrides the sideways leveling tendencies.
Another aspect is that the oceans are not very deep by comparison to the globe, just a thin layer, which can be distributed over the profile of the earth.
I have heard all the arguements as you have posted and they are known by other creationists who make the mistake of trying to explain the flood using those principles.
That model alone, does not support the global flood.
A body of water covering the earth, not only shapes and keeps the land underneath down, it also tends to follow the contour of the world's profile, rather than rising as a smooth and even sphere of water.
Some of your statements are dramatic, which means you are actually beginning to visualise on a large scale.
What I found is that once you understand how powerful a large body of water is, you begin to see how it can do the job.
You don't need a giant tidal wave foaming at the top and so on, a slight and steady movement of the oceans, a couple of knots is unstoppable.
In regards to the many other points you have made, they are valid questions which have answers that support the global flood.
For instance the Q re fresh water and salt water supplies, at the latter stage of the flood, God separated fresh water from the salty by turning it into snow and ice, later distributed for rivers etc.
The trouble with doubt is that it is the wrong tool for discovery, it continuosly holds you trapped to your own ideas, and the objections never end. If you can explore a little more, you will come across a wealth of knowledge.
Seeing this is comparative religion, faith has its place here. Logic is one of your legs, and a very good one because you have been hopping on it for a long time. Give yourself a break and use the other leg called faith, and enjoy walking with both legs.
For instance the Q re fresh water and salt water supplies, at the latter stage of the flood, God separated fresh water from the salty by turning it into snow and ice, later distributed for rivers etc.
The trouble with doubt is that it is the wrong tool for discovery, it continuosly holds you trapped to your own ideas, and the objections never end. If you can explore a little more, you will come across a wealth of knowledge.
Seeing this is comparative religion, faith has its place here. Logic is one of your legs, and a very good one because you have been hopping on it for a long time. Give yourself a break and use the other leg called faith, and enjoy walking with both legs.
This post shows that either you have not read my earlier posts, or that you don't get what was written.
You are not alone, the majority support you.
Do you mean that it does not obey the law of gravity?
Making stuff up to support a preconcieved belief is the opposite of science.
Go back a few posts, and I have given all the framework to answer that question.
There is nothing magic about hydrology, which is just a specialized case of mechanics. What you've proposed is based on a false kind of seismology. As I said before, there has been no mass extinction event in the human era. I think you need to address that. There was never an earthquake that caused the oceans to flood the world. You won't need hydrology to explain how you think it happened. You will need geometry. You will have to propose a shape of your wall of water that "splashed" every bit of land as high as Mt Everest. This of course ignores all the physical evidence that no such splash ever occurred, nor could it ever occur. I was hoping the geometry would be easier for you contemplate, instead of leaving us with some vague unexplained way that a "tongue" of water could lick the whole sphere, as you now seem to propose. The ring configuration I gave was to demonstrate the only way you could claim that the entire sphere was touched by water. Of course both the ring and the "tongue" shaped waves are impossible. The whole notion you have is impossible.
What gravity does is make this impossible. Water does not run uphill. Your problem also includes impossibly huge frictional forces, in which you are expecting your tongue of water to lick a strip across a continent then somehow rebound and paint another lick -- in another direction -- also impossible -- and with all this gyrating and friction, our water tongue retains enough energy to climb Everest. Obviously you've never done a simple conservation of energy problem or you'd be retracting all of these bogus ideas.
You mean in comparison to the radius? That's irrelevant. What is relevant is the 18th order magnitude of cubic meters of water you need to lift, from depths a deep as 10,000 m to heights of 8848 m, in order to work the magic you believe in. What's relevant is the amplitude and width of the wave you think splashed Everest. It's silly but I'd be happy to prove it's mechanically impossible.
I seriously doubt creationists are arguing the Noah was building his boat under 867 atmospheres of pressure. That would be truly ludicrous. Maybe you just didn't understand my post. Oh, well... In any case the thread topic anticipates a flood after a rain, since ancient people didn't realize their principal flood sources were snowmelts (from Turkey). Obviously rain to cover the earth is impossible. However your revision of the story to present a global tsunami is just as impossible, and easily disproven. We will need to begin by describing the size and trajectory of the tongue of water you'll need. It will take magic for you to have it lick the sphere. All the time, you will be disregarding the geophysical and biological evidence that this never occurred.
I have no idea what you mean by this. The model taken from Hebrew lore was that it rained for 40 days and nights flooding the whole earth. Missing from the story was the accounting of where the water came from, since they were ignorant of where rain comes from and, of course, they had no sense of geography. They even connected the Tigris-Euphrates to the Land of the Kush. In other words, the screwed up the map of their own back yard.
That's insane. Water obeys the law of gravity. It also obeys the law of conservation of momentum. So it's not going anywhere unless propelled, and it's not going uphill unless the energy of propulsion exceeds the gravitational potential energy.
Drama? Hah. Beginning? Guess again. Your particular version of the Water World scenario is easily debunked. It will require you to address the math. All of the other evidence I mentioned before -- no mass extinctions in the human era, no contamination of fresh water lakes, and no sedimentary or cataclysmic geophysical evidence, are insurmountable facts that just render this idea of yours as plain silly.
So far all you're propounding is pseudoscience. It purports to be science, but ignores all the salient principles and fails on the math.
A couple of knots you say? Hogwash. Lets's do the math. Let me give you a simple problem. Let's try to drive water to the top of Mt Everest. I want you to tell me the initial velocity in knots of that water. To make this easy, let's assume it's a 1 L bottle. Here's the question: what's the minimum initial velocity required to send 1L of water up a 45° slope to the top of Mt Everest, a height of 8848 m, starting at sea level? Let's put that in knots. To help you keep it closer to "a couple of knots", and to keep it simple, let's assume frictionless flow. Can you solve it? When we have an answer for the amount of energy needed, we can then multiply it by a gazillion and try to estimate the magnitude of earthquake to send how many ever cubic miles you think your water tongue was. You ought to try to do the math. Until then you're languishing in bogosity, wild hares and silly nutty pseudoscience.
No they don't. The central obstacle for you is that there never was a mass extinction in the human era. Nor was there sedimentary deposition or any other cataclysm of this scale or worldwide. And you haven't conjured up a way for God to cleanse the salt out of the lakes, as below:
Did you just make that up or did you read it in the Pseudepigrapha? God's problem has been incorrectly posed. It's not separating the water by evaporation and condensation. It's the tons and tons of salt and marine debris that would have to be sitting in all the freshwater lakes. That's a definite non-starter. it would take pumps, backhoes, dump trucks, a horde of slaves, all kinds of ungodly work for God to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Let's see who's seeking knowledge and who's shunning it when you figure out the required velocity to send 1 L of water from sea level to the top of Everest. Later we can get to the evidence that there has not been a recent global cataclysm or mass extinction. We could do this systematically and keep a score card and and see who's seeking and who is shunning. That might be good source material for another thread on knowledge vs religiosity.
You might misunderstand. This is a science board. This topic area of comparative religions is for anthropological and archaeological purposes, not to advance silly fundamentalist religious ideas. This was why I posted the actual text from the clay tablet containing the older Babylonian version of the Flood Myth - to show the comparative syncretism of this myth. As for legs, if you mean to stand on yours, you would at least be able to solve the problem of sending the water up to Everest. Until you're able to do that, you're silly idea is not even able to crawl.
Not so long ago Japan experienced a tsunami disaster. Just a few meters deep, travelling at a little over running speed, carrying all the rubbish with it, moving steadily onward, running up hills and over bridges and objects, continuing on its path as if it were unstoppable. The only reason it stopped was its own momentum. How far did it travel inland? Just one small, very insignificant wave on the surface of the earth, compared to what we are talking about.
I want to focus mainly on the behaviours of a large mass of water, not so much on how the flood was initiated, and biology and the destruction of life, and a host of other related topics you have bought up. I like the fact that you are able to accummulate related factors quickly, but I think they may be ironed out once we can establish how the water covered the earth, which is the obstacle even some believers have trouble getting over.
Now we talked before, about the flexion of the earth, I maintain that the land will sink under a mass of water, and it will change shape.
The idea of a mass of water behaving like it did during the flood is not easy to accept or conceive, and I think what I have posted is enough to work with.
Before you mentioned something interesting about the earth responding to such changes with violent eruptions etc.
That is so spot on.
During the flood the earth did just that - underwater, there were hundreds if not thousands of volcanic type explosions, some so great they left scars in the earth. We are taking about volcanic marks from 5 to 50 miles across. The world has thousands of these scars, now covered by ocean, vegetation, landslides and ice.
The illustration of the Japan tsunami should show that even though the water may look harmless, its shear weight and momentum - however slow is very destructive. Now imagine water creeping up over the land, a few meters a day, steadily increasing in distance over the land, and in depth.
The land bends down and the ocean floor rises at the changeover, the entire sea basin is on the land 1000 m deep, and so on.
This is not how the flood started, but it is how it "prevailed" over the land for about a year.
Here is a test question - how long would it take the water to subside off the once higher ground and settle back into basins, or form basins?
Thanks. I see now. It was "magic" water. Water that flows uphill.
Water can flow up hill, but it is not what I posted. When you cannot comprehend something, it is so much easier to mock isn't it?
You have only lowered yourself.