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Santa Claus: An Engineers perspective.


Sam Mcgoo

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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, (except maybe in Japan), religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to

150f 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 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 round 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 - 3000 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....

 

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium size

Lego set, (two pounds weight), 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)...

 

600,000 tons travelling 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 earths atmosphere. The lead 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 dead stop to 650 miles per second in 0.001 seconds,

would be subjected to acceleration 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.....

 

In conclusion therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. Merry Christmas........

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