Noach: Technology

(At least )3 major technological  products are significant in the parsha: The Teyva ( ark), wine production, and the Tower ( of Babel).   The works ( Ur) of the Casdim  may also be in there. 

The Teyva is a Gd directed device  that saves the selected seeds of human and animal life.  Noach  ( the builder of the ark) and his family give rise to humanity.  The equivalently selected  righteous of the birds, beasts and bugs spawn their kinds. All require a human contrived artifice, the Teyva ( ark) to withstand the deluge. 

The Teyva is constructed with exactitude. Dimensions are given. The precision of the construction  ( to within  one amah) is even given.  The teyva is the fallout shelter of its time, the ban on greenhous gases,  the move to America in 1938... the action that rescues (sometimes)

Wine production is, along with bread, one of the great early biochemical industries. These products of the controlled action of  yeast  on sugars to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide are the origins of biochemistry.  Louis Pasteur started his career  by developing a method (pasteurization) to prevent the souring of wine. 

Noach's overindulgence in the products of this art led to his embarrassment and  eternal human strife. Wine was the first drug. It is still popular and, often,  still leads to misfortune. 

The Tower was a human idea. The United Nations.  People feared that they would be dispersed. They came upon a way to work together more efficiently.   Instead of using irregularly shaped stones, they would use a uniform building material, constructed to tolerance... the brick. (Perhaps they made them in the kiln (Ur) of Casdim).  The morter seems to have been a natural stuff, the tower was a hybrid system - human brick, natural morter. 

The tower  was the internet of its time (http://), it brought together the world.  It allowed crowdsourcing.  But as the technogy advanced, the need for new languages ( Ararmaic, English, Fortran, C++, Python) overwhelmed the advantages of unity.  That which was intended to unite caused the division and dispersion. 

Our technology is puny compared with the forces that Gd bestowed upon nature. But sometimes  human intervention  rescue some of us ...Workers of the world...