THE cubit is not merely an obsolete unit; it is also an imprecise one. One cubit is the length of a man’s arm from elbow to fingertips, but different people have different-sized arms, so cubits range from 17.5 to 20.6 inches (44.5 to 52.3cm). Whichever length one plumps for, however, a boat 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high is undeniably immense. Yet if all goes according to plan, some time in 2011 a team of Amish builders will begin constructing such a boat on an 800-acre (324-hectare) plot of land in Grant County, Kentucky.
A few millennia back, if you believe your Bible, another team of builders in the Middle East constructed a boat of that size. It held two of every kind of animal, survived a flood for a long time and was piloted by a righteous man named Noah. The Kentucky Ark, however, will anchor a $149.5m theme park called Ark Encounter, which will also feature a Tower of Babel, complete with a “500-seat 5-D special effects theatre”, a replica first-century village, a walled city, a children’s zoo and an aviary.
Some see a rising tide: the park hopes to employ 900 people and draw 1.6m visitors in its first year, which should be 2014. It is 45 miles from the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which has drawn more than 1.2m visitors since it opened in 2007. It will be difficult to visit both in a single day, so all those visitors will need to sleep and eat somewhere.
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