Original subtitles

The biblical story of the great flood is legendary.

There's so much violence in the world that God decides to start over.

God says, look, all of this trouble and evil has come up before me. I'll start

over with you.

Build a boat.

He didn't say, what's an ark? How do you build a ship?

Noah just accepted it as if, oh, yeah, well, that's doable. I can do that.

According to the story, Noah finished the ark just before the rain started

falling for 40 days and 40 nights.

But would we be prepared for the great flood if it happened today?

And you never know, with global warming, we might need Noah's ark.

We're imagining a new ark that'll put today's bigger boat to shame.

But do we have the resources available to build it? And will our ark be able to

save all the creatures on Earth like Noah's did?

We've estimated that in total we have 8 .7 million species on the planet.

Let's just get what we can get, save what we can save, and start with what we

have to start with. And can we build it by the book? First, you need a command

from God. And second, you need access to gopher wood if that's involved in the

commandment. And I'm not convinced that people have either of these things today

when they're rebuilding arks. There's nothing easy about building a vessel

size. We're on the job site of one of the world's greatest wonders.

And we're wondering, how long would it take?

How much would it cost?

How many workers would we need?

Could we even do it if we built it today?

The story of Noah's Ark is so captivating that more than 4 ,000 years

we're told it set sail, believers, explorers, and even astronauts are still

searching for proof it exists.

Whenever there's supposed sightings of the Ark, it gets headline news.

According to the Bible, the remains of the Ark are in a mountainous area on the

border between Turkey and Armenia.

So far.

No physical or photographic evidence has been confirmed.

But if you want to see what the Ark might have looked like, just head to

Williamstown, Kentucky, where a theme park hosts a replica built to the exact

dimensions found in the Bible.

The Ark was built based upon, first of all, the Bible. It basically has the

height, the width, and the length.

And that's kind of all that the Bible describes.

It's the biggest timber -built structure in the world.

It stands 51 feet, or more than four stories tall, and 510 feet

long.

The length of nearly one and a half football fields.

It has four decks, and the floor space is equivalent to 20 basketball courts.

When you build it, to the size, according to the Bible, it actually says

something.

The biblical measurements of the Ark have inspired many interpretations

throughout history.

Hugh of St. Victor says that the Ark is basically a metaphor or a figure of a

type of... salvation in the world as such. And so for him, the length of the

is really measuring the day the world's created until the day when it ends. And

the width is how many people are on the boat, which is the size of the church.

And that width changes and goes in and out. As the story goes, God took drastic

measures to course correct the misguided ways of his people.

There's so much violence.

in the world that God decides to start over.

And Noah is an exception to the general picture on the face of the earth. And

God says, look, all of this trouble and evil has come up before me. I'll start

over with you, build a boat, put your family on it, and we'll start over.

Today, we build giant boats all the time.

But could we take on an ark?

It would be a massive project to build a wooden vessel the size of the Ark.

Fortunately, we have a prototype to get us started.

Welcome to the Ark Encounter at Williamstown, Kentucky.

We broke ground here in the summer of 2014 and opened in July of 2016.

We've had over 2 million guests come through the Ark Encounter from around

world. This replica gives us an idea of what the Ark might have looked like.

But this is one ship that will never sail.

It sits on concrete towers 15 feet above ground.

When someone asks me would it float, I say no. It has three big gaping holes in

the back of it because it actually is anchored to three seven -story towers.

We want to build a boat that can actually stay afloat in a great flood.

So we'll need to find a builder who's up to the task.

And it'll need to be someone with access to generations of boat building secrets

and the right tools in their toolbox.

These tools, of course, used in shipbuilding would have likely been used

the ark was built.

And Noah would have likely had a lot of tools when he built the ark that would

be made by him.

We need to consider where we'll build our ark.

Builders in Kentucky, we're at the mercy of Mother Nature.

Time and weather were probably our biggest hurdles with that whole thing.

Even if we could build a boat this big that's seaworthy, we're not sure we

get everybody, or at least every creature, on deck.

It's not easy to capture animals, and they get stressed very easily.

We can't take them out of their habitat and expect them to do well. Very few

species do well in captivity.

And if we're able to round up the required number of animals, we still

figure out how to house and feed them.

We think somewhere between 6 ,000 and 7 ,000 animals would have been cared for

by eight people every day.

I just can't foresee how that would work. It would be impossible for any

of people to sustain that number of animals for any length of time.

the cost of a huge handcrafted vessel just might sink us.

The replica in Kentucky cost millions to build.

Somebody like Ken Ham is able to raise millions of dollars to produce a huge

in Kentucky, and people come and buy tickets, and I'm sure that they're

their money back.

We won't be selling tickets to recoup our money.

So we just may need a miracle.

to float this boat.

The replica in Kentucky was the undertaking of an organization that

ark to prove that it could be done.

You can do it as just a tourist attraction, and people come to it as a

attraction. Actually, we did it because we actually do believe the Bible is

God's Word, and we do believe the message of the Bible.

Since we're not on a crusade, Is there an actual need for a working ark today?

The condition for NOAA was that the world was in crisis.

And maybe with the ecological crisis, we're also experiencing some rising

floodwaters. Climate change scientists say there's a real risk of everyone and

everything ending up underwater.

Ocean levels have been rising three millimeters annually since the year

That may not sound like much, but experts agree that over time, It could

disaster.

So, we're going to need to craft a tight ship to brave this storm.

The Great Ark of the Old Testament.

Is there a need for it today?

And could we even build it?

Climate scientists warn that sea levels are rising at an increasing rate. And in

time, our planet could face catastrophic changes.

We want to be prepared.

So, we're planning our own modern -day version of Noah's Ark.

But it will be no small task.

The hardest thing to build an ark would be your structural integrity of the

vessel so that it would be capable of floating and withstanding the stresses

strains on it.

The vessel would have been inherently strong because it had three decks on it,

and that would have added considerable longitudinal strength to the vessel, and

a vessel of 450 feet in length would be bending under the load.

Our ark will need to be very durable if it's going to stand up to the 40 days

and 40 nights of extreme weather that Noah's faced.

It looks like we're going to need more of a barge than a boat.

It would be probably very important to just try and get a very efficient shape

in terms of volume and weight carriage, and that would be pretty much as close

to a barge as you could envision.

And the dimensions given are not dissimilar to a large barge that are

today. Since we're recreating Noah's Ark, we'll need to bring just as many

animals on board as he did.

But how much weight could a vessel this size?

I would expect that you probably, a vessel of 50 feet high, would probably

want to be floating at much more than 20 feet of draft, so that gives you about

16 ,000 tons of capacity to carry cargo.

16 ,000 tons is the equivalent of 2 ,300 elephants.

Builders of the replica in Kentucky estimated a total of 7 ,000 animals on

ark, most of them weighing less than an elephant.

We'll plan to build a boat that's strong enough to support the biggest animals

on Earth and buoyant enough to lift us above rising sea levels.

And that mission will guide every decision we make on our modern -day

Ark.

Where are we going to build it?

What are we going to make it out of?

How are we going to build this thing?

How long is it going to take?

How many people will we need?

And... How much will this whole thing cost?

Our first job, choosing a construction site.

We've got our eye on this stretch of North American coastline, birthplace of

some of the biggest and fastest ships in the world.

We're well known for shipbuilding in the past. We had the Clipper ship. We had

the beautiful Blue Nose.

There's a forest full of raw materials to choose from in Nova Scotia.

There is wood likely today growing in Canada that would be...

capable of supporting that kind of a project.

And it seems like we'll be able to find the crew we need here, too.

There are still quite a few wooden shipwrights have their own shops and are

still building wooden ships.

We're sold.

We'll build it along these shores.

Now, let's consider our materials.

In the Bible, Noah built his ark out of wood.

Should we do the same?

Wood is an excellent material for building boats, and there's no

reason why it couldn't be built that size.

There's been a lot of engineering developments in boat building over the

and even in wooden boat builders, their system evolved for building over many,

many centuries.

But before we settle on wood as our main material, maybe we should make sure

we're not overlooking a better option, like steel, for example.

I think we can all agree that it'd be very easy to build a boat of that size

of steel.

Wood is 16 times lighter than steel, which is a good thing for a floating

object, but it's 16 times as weak as steel.

There are some fine steel ships built in Canada, too.

So let's not rule out a metal ark just yet.

So, how are we going to build this thing?

It turns out the Bible is a good resource for our project.

The Bible is full of instructions about how to build things. And in the case of

Noah's Ark, exact dimensions are given in cubits.

A cubit is roughly the length of a man's forearm.

That's a pretty antiquated way of measuring.

We don't want to jeopardize our project by focusing too much on the biblical

specs.

So the function of the story doesn't seem to me to drive building projects.

does other sorts of things. It maybe talks about what salvation is, how God

relates to God's people.

But whether it's providing blueprints seems to me quite unlikely.

Engineers discovered something about this ancient blueprint when they

cubits into feet.

510 feet long, 51 feet high, 84 feet wide. They're perfect dimensions.

We've talked to a lot of...

engineers on this subject.

They say it's the perfect dimensions for weight distribution, seaworthiness, and

just an overall ride for the ship.

The replica at the Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky is built to these exact

specs.

So is this one in the Netherlands called Johan's Ark.

Although it's technically in the water, Johann's Ark isn't really ready to set

sail. It's perched on top of a string of floating shipping containers.

So far, we have hypothetical dimensions guiding us in the creation of our modern

-day Ark.

Ours needs to be functional, though.

Luckily, we do have centuries of boat -building know -how to draw on.

People have been building boats out of logs and crafting canoes since

prehistoric times.

By 200 BC, the Romans were using enslaved sailors to power their

By the 1500s, sails powered ships, mighty enough to fight wars.

Today, cruise ships and freighters rule the seas.

Just how advanced will our ark need to be?

So the Ark was essentially a large volume and weight -carrying vehicle.

And it didn't need to have any propulsion. There were no engines. There

sails. And looking at that, it offers a few simplicities in the design

of a vessel of that type.

Up until the 19th century, Noah's epic Ark would have been the same size as the

largest seagoing vessel ever built.

Then, ocean liners were invented.

And ever since, they've just been getting bigger and bigger.

Check out this monster cruise liner, Harmony of the Seas. The second largest

passenger ship in the world, it can fit almost 8 ,000 passengers and crew into

18 different decks.

It cost $1 .35 billion, took four years to build.

and is more than twice the length of our ark.

This aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, is also more than twice as long

our ark, and can fit 90 aircraft on board.

And today's global economy depends on transporting a massive volume of goods

water.

With more than 2 million shipping containers in transit right now, with

modern advancement, Is a handmade wooden boat really our best option?

We want to build a massive, modern -day ark that would be able to stay afloat

like Noah's did, just in case rising sea levels cause a natural disaster of

biblical proportions.

According to the Old Testament, Noah used wood to build his ark.

but with today's technology is there a better option for ours there might have

been some ingenious things that they did that we would look and say oh wow we

just rely on cranes today that you know have big diesel motors and so on and in

fact if we try to put that technology in a ship and we do have great big steel

ships that have that sort of technology and the engine room takes up a lot of

room and then you have to have a lot of people looking after that maintaining it

actually From a perspective of building the ark today, I think we would make it

far too complicated.

Maybe Noah did know a lot more than we suspect, especially about the wisdom of

simplicity.

Wood is still used on a lot of traditional boat building and a lot of

some larger vessels.

The material is strong and resilient. It's maybe not as...

commonly available today in larger sizes as it would have been 4 ,500 years ago,

but it is an excellent material for building a vessel.

So we're going to take our cue from the ancients. We'll build our ark out of

wood. According to the Bible, Noah used gopher wood.

What is that?

Nobody really knows what gopher wood is. As a building material, the ancients

were already speculating on what it could be.

Gopher wood is likely cedar wood.

It's very good boat building wood because of its strength versus weight.

It's extremely strong wood and is still used today in vessels.

So cedar is as close as we're going to get to the exact wood used in NOAA's

time. But can we find it in this neck of the woods?

We're in this forest that has a lot of spruce in it, white spruce and red

spruce. We have that special tree here, the eastern white cedar.

Cedar is a really good wood for building boats. It's a soft wood that is easy to

work with and shape, and it's very rot resistant.

That's important, because like Noah's Ark, we want this boat to last a full

after it's finished.

These cedars that grow in eastern North America, they can get fairly big. Some

of the tallest ones can get to 100 feet.

So, how many of these big trees are we going to have to bring down?

To make an ark, you need about 20 hectares of cedar, and that's a lot of

Although we're building a boat to save us from flooding, there's a chance that

harvesting all this cedar could make the water rise even faster.

When you lose vegetation and you lose trees especially, you get erosion

problems, you get flooding problems.

Of the 250 million hectares of forest found in Canada, we only need 20

or 49 acres worth, to build our ark.

But does Canada have enough of our wood of choice?

You could be hard -pressed here now to find 20 hectares worth at least all in

one location. You'd have to go to several locations and gather up your

Maybe our friends in Kentucky can help us.

Their replica of the ark was built with enough timber to go all the way from the

museum site in Williamstown to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Well, the first thing was, it's huge.

So actually what we needed was huge wood, right? So what we did is we had to

source the lumber, and we basically got it from, you know, Washington, Oregon,

Canada, that sort of thing.

And then there are these large beams that go up the center of the ship that

of hold the whole center together.

So we'll source our cedar from multiple locations throughout North America. Then

we'll have to get it shipped to our building site.

We're looking at one of the biggest lumber orders in history.

If we looked at the overall size of that vessel, that would represent something

like 65 ,000 trees being consumed.

Where are we going to find a sawmill to deal with this mega -lumber order?

Turns out, there's a mill near our East Coast field site that's been running for

four generations.

65 ,000 logs delivered to the mill. We would debark them and dry them in a dry

kiln and plane it through our planing system and ship it to you.

But could a modern -day mill handle a boat that required biblical -sized

If they're not standard sizes, we would have to make some changes in the mill.

But those changes are nowadays with technology is quite easily made and it

be done quite easily. Just take a little time to set up. This sawmill master

says we could get the job done fast.

I don't see a problem at all with the modern technology. And we've learned so

much over the centuries from the time of Noah's Ark that it would be much easier

and take much less time than it did originally.

So our plan is progressing.

We've decided where to build our new ark and what we'll build it out of.

But before we call all aboard, who's going to do the job?

How long will it take them? And how much will the whole thing cost?

We're imagining how we'd build a new Noah's Ark.

So far, we figured out we're going to build it in Canada.

And we're going to stay true to tradition and build it out of cedar

According to the Bible, Noah had 100 years to do the job.

But we don't have that kind of time.

Surely, there are modern innovations to help us speed things up.

So if I was building an ark, I would have to turn large trees into lumber.

And this is how I do this. We did this on a mill.

and Noah would have to you all that stuff out by hand with an axe. It was a

laborious job.

Cutting down 65 ,000 trees and running them through a sawmill sounds like it's

going to be pretty expensive.

Even looking at that, I'd say $6 a foot for relatively inexpensive wood would be

$27 million in material just to make the hull.

Once all that wood gets delivered to our build site, we need a team of people to

build our ark.

So, what kind of construction crew did the original ark have?

Noah's building the ark with his family.

That's the way Genesis presents it.

It's not really a problem because they all live so long that they can take 100

years to do it. They have all the time that they need to get it done.

Noah had a family of eight, including three sons and their wives.

But how many people would we need to construct a fully functioning ark today?

I don't think a crew of eight could build the boat.

There's just too many heavy items to deal with and too much material to deal

with. I would definitely look up all of the experienced shipwrights who are

people who are experienced in wooden shipbuilding and canvas them to come to

yard to help with the ark.

taking advantage of their experience and their capabilities in doing this big

project.

It would probably take a crew of minimum 90 people working for a couple of years

to build a vessel of that size.

All of that help is going to cost us.

90 people working for two years straight, 40 hours a week, and if we pay

$60 an hour, there's another...

$25 million in labor to assemble the hull.

But it's not just the shipbuilding crew we need.

We also need to think about the crew for the journey.

I'm not sure that a crew of eight could even crew the boat while it was floating

around the ocean because there would have been feeding, cleanup, a lot of

to have been done.

We'll plan to bring our entire crew of 90 on board once construction is

complete. And it shouldn't take much persuasion.

If everybody who's building the boat really believes there's a flood coming,

they're going to be pretty committed to wanting to be on board the vessel.

So, looks like it'll be all hands on deck once we've built this thing.

We're planning to build big, but we're going to start small.

This was the tradition in wooden boat building.

Models were used instead of blueprints. And the boat was scaled off the model

and built to the exact scale of the model.

On this model, on this side, you'll see all the lines, and these are called lop

lines.

We'd have to model the arc first, lay down the lines on a big area, full size,

and start squaring timber.

Once we've chosen our building location and mocked up our model, We've got to

get a massive amount of wood on site.

In Kentucky, the wood was measured and pre -cut before it was delivered.

So once we sourced all of that material, then we had to figure out, okay, how

are we going to build all this stuff? So we wanted to actually have the thing

shipped to a certain team. They could kind of cut up the beams and put

the pieces the way that they're going to connect and then have them shipped to

the site itself.

Once the pieces arrive to our building site, it's time to put them together and

form our timber frame.

To understand what is meant by timber frame structure, because the ark we

is actually the largest timber frame structure in the world, think about it

this. A loaf of bread, and it has slices.

And you call each slice a bent.

And each bent consists of two half -bents.

And a half -bent has a big pole called a lodge pole.

And then you have half the slice of bread built on that particular pole.

And so then you put two half -bends together and you have slices of bread,

you like.

But how are we going to hold all those slices together to make a watertight

vessel?

This is a wooden tree nail or tunnel.

It's made of black locust.

It doesn't rot for 200 years or so.

So that's why it's used. And this is what holds this vessel together, is all

these tree nails.

The other advantage of using trunnels is that they won't corrode.

So electrolysis is very damaging to vessels and usually is the ending of the

vessels when all the fasteners are eaten off by electrolysis.

It's a transfer of the metal. It deteriorates the metal and causes it to

very small in the wood and finally weak until the vessel is fatigued and breaks

up. We figure it's going to take at least 10 ,000 of those trunnels to get

job done.

But how about our design?

If our boat is going to set sail, it has to be able to handle the waves.

The truth is, if you take a stick, a long stick, and you throw it into the

ocean, and you think it's going to surf the waves, it's not going to do that.

It's going to turn sideways, and it'll founder it. So what we did is we talked

to a series of nautical engineers.

And the thing that's interesting about the Ark is that it really has kind of

same dimensions of a freighter, you know, like an oil freighter, tanker,

kind of thing.

The vessel has to be extremely heavily kneaded to support the stresses and

strains and support the decks.

Knees are bent members, usually growed roots from the root of tree that is used

to put into corners as bracings in vessels and is still used today.

Our ark will need to be shaped like an oil freighter and have strong knees.

Our friends in Kentucky also figured out how to keep our ship from getting

soggy. One of the nature of wooden ships is that water sinks

into the wood and it swells the wood, and then it sort of creates a seal

all of the parts that are in there.

In the ancient ships that we studied,

Basically, we're made out of a lot of small pieces that were kind of chinked

together in a way, like a little puzzle.

And then there are multiple layers. And so you've got the ability of the hull of

the ship to be able to swell together and to close up.

We better get hammering because we have a lot of work to do.

We know where we're going to build our ark.

We figured out who will do the job, how many workers it will take, and how long

it will take them.

But we still have to look at the passenger list.

And, of course, the final price tag.

We're imagining how we build a new Noah's Ark. We know we're going to build

in Canada.

From cedarwood.

Using ancient shipbuilding methods.

Now we need to figure out how we're going to get two of every animal on

like Noah did in the Bible.

Scientists estimate that there are over 8 million species on the planet today,

but our replica builders in Kentucky believe that Noah only brought 7 ,000

animals aboard his ark.

Well, the Bible doesn't say that Noah took millions of species on the ark. It

says that two of each kind of land -dwelling, air -breathing animals. So it

wasn't the sea creatures for a start. It was only the land -dwelling, air

-breathing animals.

And it wasn't two of each species.

It was two of each kind.

You can have different species within one kind.

So if you take dogs, dingoes, wolves, coyotes, jackal, foxes, your domestic

varieties, we would say, okay, you've got different species.

But you only needed two dogs on the ark because they're all in the one dog kind.

But many in the scientific community disagree with this reasoning.

Well, one thing that wasn't well known when the Bible was written, I suppose,

was that there's a lot of genetic variability within species and that

species survive.

When species are dwindling to very, very small populations, those populations

often are not viable because of inbreeding and of genetic effects that

accumulate in the population and that make them sick and eventually they die

out. So the idea that you could just take two of each kind and make them

and that would make up for the whole and that would be a viable population is

untrue. That would not happen.

That would only be possible for very, very, very few species.

We know one thing for sure.

Whatever animals we do bring aboard need to be housed and cared for.

The Ark in Kentucky takes this into account, but the designers had to play

ear.

What we tell the guests initially is right here, we tell them that we took a

of artistic license because there's not a lot of detail about the Ark and how it

was built.

There are some details about the animals and things like that, but not a lot of

detail about, for instance, the wives' names, Noah's wife, and the daughters

-law that Noah had.

So we do take a lot of artistic license.

So what we have here is some of the cages for the larger animals. And as you

imagine, Noah and his family probably didn't want to be in the cages with the

larger animals. So we have these bridges here that we show.

where the family would have gone through the bridge and done like an automatic

feeder to bring grain and water and what the animals needed to survive.

So these animals probably were not brought out of the cages and walked

The design team researched ancient shipbuilding methods to answer some of

technical questions that have been troubling skeptics for centuries,

how Noah would have dealt with animal waste.

So there's a thing called a moon pool, which basically is a box that goes from

the top of the arc to the bottom of the arc.

And it's open to the sea. It's open to the air above and it's open to the sea

below. And the water is not going to come up inside that.

But you literally figure out a way to drop all of the waste products out into

the sea through this thing. So it literally goes through the center, you

the top and the bottom of the arc itself.

So we'll do like they do on ocean liners.

We'll treat and dump.

Scripture and speculation can only take us so far.

How can we be confident that we can save the animal world with our new ark?

Hope Swinomer has wrangled and released tens of thousands of animals.

There's no way. You know, I look at life this way.

Doing a little something is better than doing nothing at all.

So let's just get what we can get, save what we can save, and start with what we

have to start with.

That's the plan.

It would be impossible to bring two of every single species on board our ark.

So how much biodiversity are we going to be able to save?

Well, you've got to be selective. You're going to be a world traveler before

this is all done.

Even to get those 1 .5 million we have already described would be an enormous

challenge because there's many of them that have only been seen once or twice.

So collecting them would take a long, long time.

And once we had the animals on the boat, they have specific needs that we'll

have to take into consideration.

Things like sufficient room to move around.

and access to fresh air and natural sunlight.

They need all of this enrichment for their very well -being.

If they were in confinement without any enrichment, it would be like a human put

into a small square box like solitary confinement.

They would lose their will.

The other thing you'd really have to worry about is if a virus broke out. I

mean, it could wipe out every animal on the boat. It really could.

Some animals might be immune to it, but there's so many things.

medically that could go wrong.

It's a noble undertaking to rescue as many flying and breathing animals as

possible.

We'll do the best we can in the space we have.

We can sort the predators from the prey and the spiders from the flies.

But what about ticks, mosquitoes, and other insects that have been known to

carry diseases?

A lot of species have parasites and pathogens that just attack them. That's

of biodiversity. So if you really want to take all species, we have to take

too. In other words, the more animals we can save, the better.

But we also need a plan to preserve the countless scientific advancements that

have taken place since Noah's Ark was supposedly built.

So a modern equivalent to an ark is the frozen ark in England, where people are

trying to preserve genetic material of endangered species, species we're

threatened to be losing from this planet.

The idea to maintain them is not to squish them into an ark or into a zoo.

may be done for some species, but for a lot of them that's not practical. So you

take genetic samples from them, organic sperms and eggs that can be fertilized

and then recreate the species.

Instead of food and water dishes, we'll have petri dishes.

To keep the embryos frozen, we'll pack enough batteries for 40 days and 40

nights of storm.

and cover the Ark's deck with solar panels to power us when the sun finally

breaks through.

Imagine that!

Noah's Ark with a built -in science lab.

Fully equipped and capable of repopulating our world with as much

as you can cram into an ocean liner.

But this ship is far from being ready to sail.

We know where we're going to build. We know what we're going to build with.

who's going to do the job, and how long it'll take.

But it remains to be seen how much is weathering this storm going to cost us.

We're imagining a life -sized lifeboat capable of saving the population should

natural disasters strike.

It's made of cedar, a strong and sensible shipbuilding material.

The ark will take two years and 90 people working around the clock to

let's do it.

First, we need to prepare our job site.

You'd have to have an area that was graded out so that you could build a

and make sure that it was...

flat on the bottom and that it was easy to assemble and easy to work around.

Then we'll bring together craftsmen with some of the finest boat building skills

in the world.

Once we get the frame together, we'll furnish the interior with a bio lab and

pack in as many animal embryos and DNA samples as we can.

But what about our scientists and crew?

They need to stay healthy and happy.

for a year on the water.

One of the things about the ark beyond just the creation of the ship itself was

really the cargo that Noah and his family were taking with them, not just

animals. Those were the things that God told them to bring.

But they were bringing their culture with them.

We'll outfit our ark a little like a cruise ship.

We'll design top -notch cabins, plus a gym, library, cinema, and chapel.

We'll stock the kitchen with astronaut food and include fishing gear so our

passengers stay nourished until they're back on dry land.

So, bring it on. We're ready for the water to rise.

We did it! We built in Canada.

We made it out of over 65 ,000 cedar trees using a sawmill, traditional

tools, and a lot of biological know -how.

It took over two years, and we used 90 traditional shipbuilders to do it.

So, what does that add up to?

You're looking at a $50 to $60 million construction project, which is a big

project. And that's just the labor and materials.

There's also the cost of fitting our ark with a state -of -the -art laboratory.

Now we're ready to save humanity and the animal world at all costs. Right?

If we had this global hand -holding and everybody in every province or every

continent or every country was on board, the power of people can make things

happen.

Especially when you consider that the U .S. spent over $130 billion on disaster

relief in 2017 alone.

So the ark for me is an interesting metaphor for we live on an ark and this

all we got. And there's no other planet we can repopulate, at least we don't

know it yet, with the species we got. So this is what we have and we need to be

good zookeepers, if you will, and keep this place alive indefinitely.

The biblical story of Noah's Ark inspired us. It's one of many stories

about how humanity, could survive catastrophe.

It seems to me that actually some science fiction movies do a better job

reimagining what the arc might be like because you have these space capsules

flying off with all the plants that you need and all the animals, little pods,

so that you can restart life on a different planet. It may seem like sci

but scientists are already preparing an insurance policy against global

catastrophe.

Well, the importance of the Frozen Ark project really is the idea that if we

lose species at a high rate, which we are right now, if there's something we

do to bring them back after the fact, once we've figured out how to maintain

ecosystems, the tropical forests, the coral reefs, the wetlands, the ice

mountains and glaciers that we're threatened to lose.

This is our best chance at reversing the destruction of the natural world

without having to go to sea in a giant wooden ship.

It's a glimpse of a sustainable future and a hope for a happy ending if

we built it today.