Re: An Engineer's Analysis of Santa Claus

["Doug" <not@xxxxxxxx>]

Then how  do you explain all the presents under the tree on Christmas day?.

Doug

--

"Stanley Barthfarkle" <sbarth@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:XkEjh.2399$sR.1246@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 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.
>