Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.
Subject: ENGINEERS TAKE THE FUN OUT OF CHRISTMAS
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 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 onto
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.
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, not counting Santa
himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no
more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying"
reindeer can pull 10 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).
A mass of nearly 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 adsorb 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 m.p.s. in .001
seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of
17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously
slim considering all the high calorie snacks he must
have consumed over the years) 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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