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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 household, that comes to 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. If each child gets nothing more
than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over
500,000 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 cannot
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 crates 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 thousandths 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.
V. Therefore, if Santa
did exist, he's dead now. Merry Christmas!
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