wishinIwasFishin
Seaman
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2002
- Messages
- 63
SANTA CLAUS - - - - - - - - - - - - AN ENGINEER'S PERSPECTIVE<br />OR THERES ALWAYS SOMEBODY WHO WANTS TO MUCK THINGS UP.<br /><br /> There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the<br />world, however since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish<br />or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15%<br />of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau).<br />At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108<br />million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.<br /><br />[II] Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different<br />time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west<br />(which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.<br />This is to say, that for every Christian household with a good child, Santa<br />has around 1/1000 of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the<br />chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree,<br />eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney,<br />jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of<br />these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which of<br />course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose of our<br />calculations). We are talking about 1.25 Km per household,<br /><br />a total of 120.8 million Km, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.<br /><br />This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 1040 Km per second........<br /><br />3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest<br /><br />man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 43.8 <br /><br />Km per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 25<br />Km per hour.<br /><br />[III] The pay load of the sleigh adds another interesting element.<br />Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting<br /><br />Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than <br /><br />300 pounds, even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the<br />normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them.....<br /><br />Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload,<br /><br />not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons,<br /><br />or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).<br /><br />[IV] 600,000 tons travelling at 1040 Km per second creates enormous air<br />resistance....this would heat up the lead reindeer in the same fashion as a<br />space shuttle re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of<br />reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each.<br /><br />In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the<br />reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. <br /><br />The entire reindeer team would be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a<br />second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.<br />Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a<br />dead stop to 1040 k p s in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal<br />forces of 17,500 G's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would<br />be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly<br />crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink<br />goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.