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→Rescue, Reunion, and Realization
Upon their return to earth--and reunion with their grateful wives--each man must independently resolve a personal crisis. Shepherd's faith has suffered a challenging test, because he cannot explain the base in light of the Bible's implications that humans are the only intelligent people in the [[universe]]. But Lucas surprises Shepherd by announcing that he has become a Christian himself--and has realized that, by whatever mechanism (not time travel, but an incredibly realistic holographic simulation), Lucas has witnessed the [[Great Flood]] of [[Noah]]. He has even eaten at Noah's table, helped him finish his [[Noah's Ark|Ark]], and attended the death of none other than [[Methuselah]], Noah's grandfather. The base they found was built by human--and specifically [[Antediluvian civilization|antediluvian]]--hands.
Upon their return to earth--and reunion with their grateful wives--each man must independently resolve a personal crisis. Shepherd's faith has suffered a challenging test, because he cannot explain the base in light of the Bible's implications that humans are the only intelligent people in the [[universe]]. But Lucas surprises Shepherd by announcing that he has become a Christian himself--and has realized that, by whatever mechanism (not time travel, but an incredibly realistic holographic simulation), Lucas has witnessed the [[Great Flood]] of [[Noah]]. He has even eaten at Noah's table, helped him finish his [[Noah's Ark|Ark]], and attended the death of none other than [[Methuselah]], Noah's grandfather. The base they found was built by human--and specifically [[Antediluvian civilization|antediluvian]]--hands.
Lucas explains his conclusion this way: antediluvian human beings lived, on average, nine hundred years. They also were from the first ten generations from Adam, hence had suffered none of the decay from millennia in our fallen environment. Furthermore, under no circumstances could any society as primitive as commonly supposed, could have built anything as massive, and as eminently seaworthy, as Noah's Ark. Its larger physical dimensions are consistent with an average human stature of eight feet – in other words, all humans were giants then. The evidence for antediluvian civilization lies buried under miles of layered sedimentary (and in some places, igneous and metamorphic) rock. Lucas, of course, gets only the barest hint of the violence of the Flood as an event. He found that much violence alone would suffice to destroy every trace of antediluvian civilization. Nor would Noah and his family be able to pick up where they left off. ("I use a wristwatch every day," he tells his colleague. "But if you asked me how to make one, or even to tell you how to make one, I couldn't do it.")
=== Modern insights ===
Johnson wrote his novel before the current age of [[cloud storage]] and [[streaming]]. An event as violent as the Great Flood, happening today, would necessarily destroy all cloud and streaming services. The lack of any hard-copy archives would, of course, mean the event would destroy all stored content. If antediluvian civilization had fully embraced cloud storage and streaming, none of the content in such storage would survive.
Furthermore, since ''Ice'' went to print, Walter T. Brown has greatly expanded his own estimate (the [[Hydroplate Theory]]) of the violence of the Great Flood. To be more specific, Brown would certainly agree that ejecta from the subcrustal oceans would in fact bombard the Moon within days of the Flood, as Astronaut Lucas experiences in the holographic simulation. Furthermore, Brown guesses that the Earth ejected ''two to four percent of its mass'' into space. That extra mass persists as the meteoroids, [[asteroid]]s, [[comets]], and [[Trans-Neptunian Objects]] we know today – and likely most of the moons, large ''and'' small, of the [[gas giant]] [[planet]]s of our solar system. An event as violent as that would surely destroy every ground building that stood before the Flood, and every ship, except only a ship built according to a Divine design.
== Characters ==
== Characters ==