Noah's Arc

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe


I believe I made the same refrence.

You're just seeing what you want to see.

And obvioulsy I suck at the whole visualization thing. I could never get the handle of those posters you were supposed to stare at and all of a sudden an image appears if you look at it just right. Never saw a single thing.

I always love those Rorshach tests where the blob is clearly a silhouette of some ******* coming at you with a butcher knife raised overhead, but you're a raging psycho if you point that out, while you're delusional if you answer anything else.

[Japher]

Op-Art...

"Oh, wow, it's a schooner"

[chequita guevara]

I don't see a ship. I see two rocks and a curve in the wrong place in between them to be a ship.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
I always love those Rorshach tests where the blob is clearly a silhouette of some ******* coming at you with a butcher knife raised overhead, but you're a raging psycho if you point that out, while you're delusional if you answer anything else.

Guess I'm delusional, I always said chainsaw.

[chequita guevara]

I see a whirling vortex of doom and dispair which sucks the souls of men to their destruction. Then he said, no, that's a picture of my wife you're looking at, the ink blot is over here. So I said was I wrong, and he said, No, that's the sad part.

[MichaeltheGreat]

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Now, in all honesty, answer this question. If you were shown that photograph of the mountain without the drawn-in arrows and circle and without being told what mountain it was, would you see any evidence whatsoever for a man-made object? Or anything other than rock outcroppings?

Going back to just a simple answer, eh? See what I mean.

You have no sense of curiosity or investigation into religious artifacts because you're afraid of the truth being revealed to you about them, and you see what you want to see because of it.

Here's a newsflash, babyface!: If you let fear get to you, it will be your worst enemy. In which case you already have.

[Japher]

Hey diddle diddle
The cat and the fiddle
The Astronauts killed the man in the moon
and growing up took care of the rest

-Night Court


The greatest words ever spoken were not "Eureka, I have found it!" they were "That's odd"...

-Don't remember

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Mr. Nice Guy
Here's a newsflash, babyface!: If you let fear get to you, it will be your worst enemy. In which case you already have.

Are you of the opinion that the best way to practice your faith is to insult those who disagree with it?

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by loinburger

Are you of the opinion that the best way to practice your faith is to insult those who disagree with it?

It's not an insult. It's the truth.

[loinburger]

I'll take that as a "yes," then.

[GePap]

I see Mr Nice Guy ignores MtG's voluminous post on the nature of glaciers....I wonder why?

BUt of course we all know God decided to change the laws of nature to make sure this party found the boat intact.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
So sorry, but I think you'll be rather disappointed. This type of find isn't unique, so there's quite a bit of documented understanding of the processes involved in things getting buried in glaciers and then getting spit out later. Aircraft flying into mountains back in the bad ol' days before modern onboard navigation systems are the most common example, with plenty of USAF speciments in Alaska, and some civil aviation specimines in the Andes mountains.

FYI, I'm not an atheist, so your usual duck-and-run fundy arguments about evil atheists and media lies won't really cut it.

There's a bunch of things we know about glaciers, so unless you want to posit (without any Biblical proof or any reason God would do so) that this particular chunk of glacier on Mt. Ararat behaves differently from every other one in the world, you're going to have to live with a few unpleasant details for the Noah's Ark is here theory.

1) Glaciers move, and they do it at different rates depending on where you are, as a function of proximity to underlying terrain, terrain friction, ice depth, sun and wind exposure, deposition rates of new snow or rain, and subsurface water.

2) This variation in movement is more pronounced on a small scale.

3) The result of this is that large things in glaciers such as airplanes tend to get spectacularly torn up and distributed very unevenly (this is distinct from the debris field caused by initial impact)

Noah's ark was obviously wood, and depending on how literally you want to take the date, and how much of a Bishop Usher fan you are, somewhere around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Nothing in the Bible says anything about any special wood, time for drying, construction techniques, etc., so the best info we have is early Phoenician and Greek, etc. shipbuilding techniques and the known properties of indigenous trees. Whatever you get for serviceable boats, you don't get an icebreaker. We also have a lot of info (courtesy of some lost whalers and early Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, what happens to wooden ships that get caught in moving ice sheets. The ice tries to move in the direction it wants to, encounters the hull, and tries to go around. Which causes a lot of compression and shear stress.

What you've got in those photos is something (or somethings) at one hell of an angle, in or over a little ravine or draw in the mountain face (color and shape of ice tell you that, plus the visible terrain), which means there is more rapid ice movement on the top than near the mountain face, and more rapid ice movement over the ravine or draw than on the elevated portions of the mountain face. That means 4,000 years of wood being sheared, torn, and squished all to hell and back, and no way that any large scale structure would be even close to intact. Also, the upper portion would move more slowly than the lower portion, (due to terrain friction), so you'd expect the Ark (if it was there) remains to be spread in the direction of ice flow for over a mile, maybe more, depending on movement rates and microclimate over the intervening thousands of years.

In short, whatever that is is extremely unlikely to be any integrated structure of any grat age, especially a wood ship. Even if Noah's Ark was up there, the glacier would have mostly reduced it to a spread out mishmash of wood fibers, mulch, and the occasional odd sized something that looked almost like driftwood. Knees, pieces of keel, etc. could be identified with some luck, but only if you were able to completely remove the ice from that area, and if they'd managed to fall someplace where they were exceptionally sheltered from substantial shearing.

The best place to recover any such items wouldn't be near the top of the mountain, it woud be near the base of the glacier much further down the mountain, especially if that ravine or draw ran for any great distance. Glacial ice can flow pretty fast (quite a few feet per year) in the right conditions, so nothing that landed up high in the ice thousands of years ago is still going to be up that high now.

But Jesus looked at them and said to them, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." --Matthew 19:26

[GePap]

And yet you have the gall to be so prideful as to believe God himself would alter the laws of nature simply to validate your faith?

Talk about the biggest sinner of all.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by GePap
And yet you have the gall to be so prideful as to believe God himself would alter the laws of nature simply to validate your faith?

What else would you expect from the Almighty?