SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective (don't show the kids)

SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
>
> I.
>
> There are approximately two billion children (persons
> under 18)in the world.
> However, since Santa does not visit children of
> Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist
> religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas
> night to 15% of the total, or 378
> million (according to the Population Reference
> Bureau). At an average (census) rate
> of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108
> million homes, presuming that
> there is at least one good child in each.
>
> II.
>
> Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with,
> thanks to the different time
> zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he
> travels east to west (which seems
> logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.
> This is to say that for each
> Christian household with a good child, Santa has
> around 1/1000th of a second to park
> the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings,
> distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks
> have been left for him, get
> back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on
> to the next house.
>
> Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is
> evenly distributed around the earth
> (which, of course, we know to be false, but will
> accept for the purposes of our
> calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a
> total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or
> breaks. This means Santa's sleigh
> is moving at 650 miles per second --- 3,000 times the
> speed of sound. For purposes
> of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the
> Ulysses space probe, moves at a
> poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional
> reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles
> per hour.
>
> III.
>
> The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting
> element. Assuming that each child
> gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two
> pounds), the sleigh is carrying
> over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On
> land, a conventional reindeer
> can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that
> the "flying" reindeer could
> pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be
> done with eight or even nine of
> them --- Santa would need 360,000 of them. This
> increases the payload, not counting
> the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or
> roughly seven times the weight of
> the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
>
> IV.
>
> 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
> resistance --- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as
> a spacecraft re-entering the
> earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would
> absorb 14.3 quintillion joules
> of energy per second each. In short, they would burst
> into flames almost
> instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and
> creating deafening sonic
> booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be
> vaporized within 4.26
> thousandth of a second, or right about the time Santa
> reached the fifth house on his
> trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a
> result of accelerating from a
> dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be
> subjected to centrifugal forces of
> 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously
> slim) would be pinned to the
> back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force,
> instantly crushing his bones and
> organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink
> goo.
>
> Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
>
>
>