SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
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.
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