Santa: An Engineer's Perspective Options

[Imhotep]

(I can't take credit for this, no idea where it originally came from).

Merry Christmas all!


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 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 house-

hold; 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 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 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.

[Guest_ohsteve_*]

But you forgot that Santa is magic and magic can do anything, including making time stand still. So therefor Santa is alive and taking all the time he needs to deliver all those goodies to boys and girls. Becuase to him time is meaningless.
Merry Christmas!!

[Cleo_Serapis]

Ha hahahahahahahaahahahaha!

Silly man!

~C

[AMETHYST]

This was soooooo funny... thanks for sharing it...
and Steve, we know that Santa's magic gets him through the night ...
How else would he fit through my air duct .... :)

This was quite cute and I enjoyed reading the deductions of Christmas FLight...

Hugs, Liz