[extropy-chat] Surviving a flood...

Alan Eliasen eliasen at mindspring.com
Tue Jan 6 22:00:59 UTC 2004


   In the spirit of the recent calculations of heaven and hell, I humbly
submit a mathematical analysis that I once made about surviving another
Biblical flood.

   The context that led to all of this was that someone stated that
during the flood, "it would have been a good time to be a duck."

-------

   Hmmm... I wondered about that a bit... would a duck have survived a
Great Flood?  The rainfall rate, as seen below, was quite vigorous.  I
just did a bit of research and found that the bible was quite clear on
this point:

    "All flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of
cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the
earth, and every man.  All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of
all that was in the dry land, died."  (Genesis 7:21-22)

    Sorry, Mr. Ducky.  But that's pretty clear.

    I guess that just leaves sea animals.  How many fish would have been
killed?  Let's see.  The bible is also quite precise in its measurement
of the flood.  Genesis 7:19-20 states that "And the waters prevailed
exceedingly upon the earth; and all the mountains, that were under the
whole heaven, were covered.  Fifteen cubits upward did the waters
prevail; and the mountains were covered."

    Okay, so the highest mountains of the earth were covered, plus an
extra 15 cubits (approx 27 feet) for good measure.  The current
measurements for highest mountain is Mt. Everest at 29030.8 feet
(according to the highly dubious and utterly non-trustable 2002 Guinness
Book of World Records.)

     I know that Everest is growing slowly, (best estimates are 2.4
inches/year) so we'll discount for that.  (It makes very little
difference in any case.)  I'm using my "Frink" calculating tool (
http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/ ) to find out what this comes out
to.  In Frink notation, this is:

    depth = 29030 feet + 15 biblicalcubits - (2.4 inches/year 4000 years)

    About 28257 feet of water.  This was deposited over 40 days.  The
rainfall was thus:

    rainfall = depth / (40 days)

    Or about 353 inches/hour, or 29 feet/hour.  A good rain around here
is about an inch an hour.  The very rainiest places on earth get about
this much rain in a *year*.  (I'm campaigning Colorado farmers to sin a
bit more...)

    To see if this is a fatal rainfall, one could put a duck in a bucket
(say, a big bucket with a water surface area of 1 square foot, and pour
3.7 gallons of water on him every minute for 40 days and see if he
enjoys it, or repents.  Poor ducky.  I don't think *I* would do this to
him, no matter what bad things he did.

   That's a huge amount of water to add to the planet.  Over the surface
of the earth, this is an approximate additional water volume of:

    floodvolume = 4 pi earthradius2 depth

    This is about 4.4 billion cubic kilometers of water added to the earth.

    Several sources give the current volume of the earth's oceans as
about 1.37 billion cubic kilometers.

    oceanvolume = 1.37 billion cubic kilometers

    The volume attributed to the flood is about *3.2 times* the volume
of the water in earth's oceans.  Thus, the salinity of the water
(assuming the flood waters were fresh water) would be reduced to a
factor of:

    oceanvolume / (floodvolume + oceanvolume)

    Or, to a salinity of only about 24% of the ocean's original value.
Any sea fish or freshwater fish that couldn't live in this new altered
salinity for at least 150 days would die.  The lakes and oceans would of
course become one giant ocean covering the planet.  (The exact amount of
mixing of the layers is left as a problem for the biblical scholar.)  I
don't know how many fish this would kill; does anyone?

    And think of the change in ocean pressure!  Adding over 28000 feet
of water column would increase ocean pressure by:

    depth water gravity -> psi

    Or over 12,000 pounds per square inch increase in pressure at any
given level in the former oceans!  This is about 833 atmospheres of
pressure!  Every fish that didn't start swimming upward would tend to be
crushed by the pressure.   A fish accustomed to living near the surface,
if it stayed in the same spot, would soon find itself under pressures as
high as the bottom of the ocean is now.  How fast does the pressure
increase?

    rainfall gravity water -> psi/hour

    About 12 psi/hour or .87 atmospheres/hour.  Most fish could take
this rate of increase over a short period, but would probably have to
make up their mind early to start moving on up.

    A quick look at standard Navy decompression tables hints that if a
clever human tried to ride out the great flood by remaining underwater,
they would have to keep swimming upward pretty constantly.   When you're
adding 29 feet of water every hour, it would be quite easy to get behind
to a point that you couldn't ever catch up.

    It probably wasn't fun to be a fish or a bottom-dwelling creature at
that time, either.  They might die by:

    * Salinity changes
    * Pressure changes

    What else?

    So where did the water come from and where did it go to?  Creating
this much water from energy at this rate (E=mc2) would require a power
output *652 trillion times* the amount of power that the earth receives
from the sun.  No half-measure, this flood.

----

    P.S.  I learned something else from this.  Here's a good trivia
question to spring on your favorite biblical scholar:  "how many animals
of each type did Noah take with him on the ark?"  I found out from this
research that the answer isn't what I thought it was.  I sprung this on
my mom, who has been teaching religious education classes for 26 years
and she didn't know it.  (No, it's not the usual "How many animals did
Moses bring on the ark" trick question.)  It's not at all a trick
question--it seems that the bible has been quoted incorrectly in the
popular literature.  I wonder how many people would get this right?  For
the answer, read Genesis 7:2-3.  To make it more specific, you can ask
"how many ducks did Noah take on the ark?"

-- 
  Alan Eliasen                 | "You cannot reason a person out of a
  eliasen at mindspring.com       |  position he did not reason himself
  http://futureboy.homeip.net/ |  into in the first place."
                               |     --Jonathan Swift




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