In Reply to: re: an eye for an iphone? posted by Realist on January 09, 2010 at 02:32:49:

So you are finally going to stop posting here? Well Deo Gratias.

One final comment on the Ark question - I presume now that you have bowed out you won't even read this but it's interesting nonetheless.

At church here in Castlebar on Sunday there was standing room only. It struck me that the large parish Church in Castlebar is pretty much exactly the length and breadth of the Ark. It's a bit taller but I would guess about under the acre in area. I'm not sure exactly how many people were in the Church but I would say 1000+. It was jammed packed. There are narrow aisles between the main seating but the rest of the floor area was jammed elbow-to-elbow with people seated and standing.

As a thought experiment I divided it up into three levels as if it were an Ark. It might fit 3000 people shoulder to shoulder.

But we were talking black hole of Calcutta stuff. Then replace the 3000 people with 57,000 to 200,000 vertebrate animals stacked up - that would be 30 to 60 vertebrates in the space of just one person sitting down in their pew or standing on the floor - and of course the two to 10 million insects buzzing and crawling around the place.

Yesterday there was no food and water - just vertebrate people. Food and clean water (can't drink salty water remember) for the long journey of course would have to be squashed in somewhere too - millions of litres of water and food.

An hour or so was bearable but to be there for 10 months nonstop would pose problems. The top deck would have air but the lower decks would inevitably end up like the black hole of Calcutta or those containers that arrive on a regular basis full of dead illegal would-be immigrants that just run out of air or overheat.

Of course the other interesting thing is that the 1000+ people in the church here on Sunday are not required to believe that there were Dinosaurs on the Ark. They are taught that the story of the Ark is a story and the Catholic Church is also perfectly happy with the concept of evolution and modern cosmology come to that. But then you know better than the formal teaching of the largest Christian denomination?