As coffee table books go, Waiting for the End of the World is a bit on the small size, but it is mostly full-page photos, so I that’s how I’ll categorize it. The author Richard Ross traveled around the world photographing the insides of bomb shelters, and consequently the book covers mainly countries – such as Russia, Vietnam, Israel and of course the USA. The most interesting photos are the ones that show habitation rather than just metal walls:

More photos are at Good magazine. I have bought it, and it’s in the lounge. I figure it’s a different way of bringing up 2012 with friends & visitors.

Even a layperson like myself knows that for our entire planet to be underwater for 40 days is impossible. For a flood to even reach the 5,000 metre height of Mt Ararat is also impossible. This is one of the few things the 2012 movie got wrong. The big news this week is the dating of the timber supposedly found on Mt Ararat by Noah’s Ark Ministries International (ie not real archaeologists, and they have a strong motive for faking the whole thing).  The date given is 2800BC, which would date it to the time of Noah’s flood.

Blogger Todd Price gives these reasons for why it wouldn’t be Noah’s Ark:

1. They claim that radiocarbon dates the wood to 4800 years before present, but the Ark was constructed of pre-Flood wood, which would mean that the carbon dating should be much, much older. 2. The modern “Mt. Ararat” (Agri Dagh) is a post-Flood volcano. The Ark could not have landed on Agri Dagh because it did not exist at the end of the Flood, and even if it did land on modern Agri Dagh, it would have been destroyed by the many, many eruptions of Ararat since the Flood. You can observe all the fresh lava flows on Agri Dagh at Google Maps. 3. Given that the Flood survivors left the Ark to find a devastated world, the Ark would have been the best source of timber for the first decade or so. I think it highly likely that the Ark was dismantled to supply the growing population with building material for shelter.

Even more telling is this quote from Randall Price:

I was the archaeologist with the Chinese expedition in the summer of 2008 and was given photos of what they now are reporting to be the inside of the Ark. I and my partners invested $100,000 in this expedition (described below) which they have retained, despite their promise and our requests to return it, since it was not used for the expedition. The information given below is my opinion based on what I have seen and heard (from others who claim to have been eyewitnesses or know the exact details). To make a long story short: this is all reported to be a fake. The photos were reputed to have been taken off site near the Black Sea, but the film footage the Chinese now have was shot on location on Mt. Ararat. In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers hired by Parasut, the guide used by the Chinese, are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area (where the photos were originally taken) at the Mt. Ararat site. In the winter of 2008 a Chinese climber taken by Parasut’s men to the site saw the wood, but couldn’t get inside because of the severe weather conditions. During the summer of 2009 more wood was planted inside a cave at the site. The Chinese team went in the late summer of 2009 (I was there at the time and knew about the hoax) and was shown the cave with the wood and made their film. As I said, I have the photos of the inside of the so-called Ark (that show cobwebs in the corners of rafters – something just not possible in these conditions) and our Kurdish partner in Dogubabyazit (the village at the foot of Mt. Ararat) has all of the facts about the location, the men who planted the wood, and even the truck that transported it.”

What if Noah’s Ark is found one day? Would timber from an appropriate era be sufficient to prove it was an ark? Unless there was definite evidence of it having spent some time in the sea, I’d say such a find would be a bunker, not an ark. Myths and true stories can and do change with time. It seems entirely possible to me that if the story of the flood was exaggerated, so that there was no more land, then by necessity the ark would need to be a ship. But if the floods did not reach 5,000 metres above sea level, then the best place to survive would be on land, above the floodlines.  And as 2012 survivalism researchers like myself and Patrick Geryl keep saying, the safest place to be during a global cataclysm would be in a bunker, up a mountain. The enormous dimensions of the ark suggest to me that a bunker would be more likely in the original story. 135 metres long, 22 metreswide, and 13 metres high would be a huge bunker, but easier to build than a  ship of the same size. Five thousand years ago it may have made sense to line a bunker with wood. And to paint it with pitch to help waterproof it.

Here’s a video of the supposed ark: