Sorry...:)
According to scripture the ark was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high.
A conservative calculation for the cubit is around 17.5 inches while some scholars believe it to be closer to 56 centimeters or 22 inches.
This puts the arks size at around 437 feet long, 72 feet wide by 43 feet high.
(A length to width proportion of 6 to 1 which is still used by naval architects)
There were two floors which gave added support and three decks equaling around 96,000 square feet.
Now for the amount of capacity.
Besides Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives, living creatures, of every sort of flesh, two of each ‘kind’ were to be brought on board.
(male and female)
Of the ‘clean’ beasts and fowls, seven of each were to be brought aboard.
It has been estimated by some that the hundreds of thousands of species of animals today could be reduced to a comparatively few family ‘kinds’- the horse and cow to mention only two.
With this thinking, some scientists have said that had there been 43 ‘kinds’ of mammals, 74 ‘kinds’ of birds and 10 ‘kinds’ of reptiles in the ark, they could have produced the number of species that we have today.
This is only speculation and seems restrictive since sources such as the Encyclopedia Americana indicates that there are upwards of 1,300,000 species of animals.
However, over 60 percent of these are insects.
Breaking the figures down further, of the 24,000 amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, 10,000 are birds, 9,000 are reptiles and amphibians, many of which could have survived outside of the ark.
5,000 are mammals, including whales and porpoises which would have also remained outside the ark.
Some scientists estimate that there are only about 290 species of land animals larger than sheep and about 1,360 smaller than rats.
If you wish to do the mathematics you can see where the ark was large enough to handle the amount of ‘species’ that would carry on to today.
(I have a headache in just researching the scriptures and getting this overly long post ready for posting)
I know, some will say what about the dinosaurs but since that isn’t mentioned in scripture .. my guess is that they didn’t live during the time of Noah.
These are just my thoughts, simple as they may be and not all encompassing for sure.
Other Christians can probably add more than what I have said here because .. there is so much more!
I apologize if I have upset any of my friends on the forum.
(any spelling errors are strictly mine) 8(
“The students said it was not clear if all the animals would actually be able to fit on board. But if they did, the boat would still float.”
Yeah, that’s not very clear but whatever floats your boat, boys.
There are 6.5 million known species found on land and 2.2 million dwelling in the oceans, rivers and lakes.
And most of them have particular diets, for ex. that cute little `bear’ from Down Under can thrive only on fresh eucalyptus leaves. Keep in mind that Noah was also ordered to load chow for his own family and food and fresh water for over 17 million animals, who understood they were not to eat one another. (But once things got back to normal, about 190 days after the rain started, the prey/predator relationship and meat-eating for the heads of the food chain—OK.)
Considering that Jehovah then gave Noah and his family, wife, sons and daughters-in-law, only seven (7) days notice of his additional desire to have seven more of all the “clean animals” added to the cargo, I think Noah deserves congratulations for his ability to exhort his crew to gather these scores of millions of additional specimens, all from the four corners of the Earth and from beneath the seven seas, in time.
(Further complicating the storage problem is that water species prefer either salt or fresh water, so we’ll have to assume that most of the sea creatures made out OK on their own, e.g. the larger whales, even if the rain was not salty.)
On top of these difficult logistics, Noah was getting up there in age. I sure hope that I’m that fit when I hit 500 years. I love this story. It’s absolutely incredible!