An Engineer's Analysis of Santa Claus

["Stanley Barthfarkle" <sbarth@xxxxxxxxx>]

Engineers take all the fun out of Christmas...

There are approximately two and
one-half billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However,
since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist
(except maybe in Japan) 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 108 million homes, presuming there
is at least one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the
different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming 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 stocking, 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 0.7
miles per household; a total trip of 75.6 million miles, not counting
bathroom stops or breaks.

This means Santa's sleigh is moving faster than 675 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 pokey 27.4 miles
per second, and a conventional reindeer can (at best) run at the rate of
15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (about
three pounds), the sleigh is carrying approximately 570 thousand tons,
not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no
more than 300 pounds. Even granting that a "flying" reindeer could pull
10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even
nine of them -- Santa would need 378,000 of them. This increases the
payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 38,000 tons, or
roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the
monarch).

Six hundred thousand tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates
enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same
fashion as a spacecraft reentering 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 mps. in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to
acceleration forces of 17,000 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. Merry Christmas.







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