Forget for a moment that Noah's Ark, were it built, couldn't carry two of every animal. Just set aside the problems of gathering those animals from seven continents and make the assumption that the thing could have worked, if built. After all, we are talking about a vessel that would be an order of magnitude bigger than anything built in the ancient world. The Bible tells us that the Ark was 450 feet long by 75 feet wide by 45 feet high. Those aren't actually bad dimensions for a relatively stable craft, provided one keeps the elephants down low. God, after all, did say that it should be built of gopher wood, a "lost" term that seems related to cypress, a dimensionally stable softwood used in boat building throughout history, or some even higher-technology lamination process. Sounds like He might have known what He was talking about, or did He?
In the 19th century, truly massive ships were built of wood. The Flying Cloud was 225 feet long with a beam of 41 feet and a depth of hold about 21 feet, and displaced 1781 metric tons. Reaching documented speeds of up to 20 knots, clippers like the Flying Cloud show us that massive, rugged structures can indeed be built out of wood, so what is wrong with Noah's Ark?
Let's take a look at the Ark's scantlings. Using tried and true rules of thumb for wooden boat construction (the same ones used for calculating the Flying Cloud's scantlings in historical fact, by the way), we can figure the following:
Plank Thickness: 6 inches
Transverse Frame Thickness: 8 inches
Transverse Frame Depth: 12 inches
Keel Cross-Sectional Area: 450 square inches
Deck Thickness (load bearing): 4 inches
These dimensions are simply the minimum necessary to keep the Ark from breaking apart. Now figuring that the Ark, for its intended purpose was probably fantastically bluff ended, you can estimate weights from a rounded box of the same size.
Plank Area: 70,000 square feet
Transverse Frame Length (total, 34 frames equally spaced): 5,355
Keel Length: 490
Deck Areas (3 internal, 1 external for 3 stories internally): 121,500
Now it is easy to estimate the volumes of materials necessary for construction.
Skin Structural Planking: 35,000 cubic feet
Transverse Frames: 3570 cubic feet
Keel: 1531 cubic feet
Decks: 40,500 cubic feet
Using a truly excellent nautical wood like mahogany, this structure (unladen) would weigh 2,579,232 pounds, or 1289 tons. If "gopher wood" were more like cedar or cypress, or was a light laminated wood, the structure would ONLY weigh 2,256,828 pounds, 1128 tons.
Clearly, there are some problems here. Noah probably didn't have access to modern epoxies. Therefore, any laminate would have to use mechanical fasteners like screws or nails. The problem with using screws or nails is that the strength of the "laminate" created by such processes is much lower than one would expect (the nails/screws being intrinsic stress points, and the sole progenitors of clamping force, a very inefficient sort of laminate indeed) and therefore the scantlings dimensions would have to be increased drastically (tripled or greater). Just felling the trees, boarding the wood, and moving it to the worksite would have taken Noah and sons several hundred years.
It gets worse, however. It takes around 60 man hours to finish a small, simple stitch and glue plywood boat 18 feet long. This is with pre-cut parts, and pre-finished materials. With cutting and planning necessary for a boat of raw wood, you're looking at more like 200 man hours, four weeks of hard work. The finished structure would weigh on the order of 300-400 pounds. Noah and sons had a much bigger challenge. A good rough estimate would be to simply use the surface area (the finished area) as a guide for man-hours.
In the case of the dinghy, the surface area is around 126 square feet, so if we don't care much what it looks like, we're talking about a man-hour per square foot. That works out to something like 216,000 man hours for the ark, or 4,500 hard 12 hour days for four men (remember, this is without going out to gather materials...felling trees, hauling them, etc). Working flat out at that rate for 12 years would just about do it, if it didn't kill you first.
Of course, actually planking the boat is the easiest part of the venture. First, you have to go out into the forest, and fell trees. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of lacking a chainsaw for tree cutting knows that felling a tree with a good steel axe and the sweat of your brow takes a good long time. We're talking about an hour of hard work just to drop a tree with a three foot girth. Noah and company did not have access to good hard steel axes. Theirs were either stone or bronze, and much less efficient. For every hour of chopping, Noah would have to spend ten minutes sharpening the tool.
Then Noah and sons would have to strip the small branches off, load that log into a cart, and tote it off. Noah and sons will then have to board the tree themselves using hand ripsaws and adzes. They'll then have to hand-plane the boards. Assuming they used traditional planking methods, the tree would result in a maximum of three or four good boards of about 20' length, 2' width and 6" thickness. It would take all day (probably more than a day, but we'll give them holy powers of construction). Even if all four were working like hyperactive mongeese on amphetamines, and they are going to need around 5,400 such boards, not counting waste, which can run as high as 40% in a boat-building project, so realistically, more like 7560 boards. In other words, they're going to spend 2,200 days just cutting trees and making boards. Keep in mind that those boards, as soon as they're dried, are going to start to dry rot...
Clearly, constructing the ark is going to take a long time. In kind of a "best case scenario", we've gotten old Noah and company up to 6,700 days already, over 18 years. With a construction project of this magnitude, things will go wrong. A single plank, properly scarfed to the right length, would be enormously heavy, something like 14,400 pounds. Working by hand with such an object would be purely impossible for four men, no matter how motivated, without mechanical intervention. Cranes, pulleys, levers, etc. all make the impossible possible, but at a cost. Unless Noah just happens to have some really big equipment stashed about his farm, he's going to have to build that too...and then there is the strongback, the jig on which the boat must be laid.
There is a reason that the world did not see massive ships like the Ark (or the Flying Cloud) until the Industrial Revolution. Even the mighty Spanish Galleons topped out at just under 200 feet. Anything else was just too difficult and too costly to build. Such projects take hundreds of men, enormous quantities of materials, and keen logistical planning. These things were simply not available to Noah.
It seems to me that there are two ways of looking at texts like the Bible. The first is as allegory and metaphor, the second is as the literal truth. If you're keen on the latter view, I think you just might be missing the boat on Noah and sons.
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