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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 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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