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santa
Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective
I. There are approximately 2 billion
children (persons under 18) in the
world. However, since Santa does not
visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish,
Jehovah's Witnesses, or Buddist
religions, this reduces the workload on
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 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 at least one good child,
Santa has around 1/1000th of a second
to park the sleigh, jump out, go 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 in the sleigh, and move
on to the next house. (That's why it's
really pointless to stay up and wait
for him....)
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 breaks. This means that Santa's
sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second,
3000 times the speed of sound. For the
purposes of comparison, the fastest
man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space
probe, moves at a pokey 75.4 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 has 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
nothing more than 300 pounds. Even
granted that "flying" reindeer could
pull ten times the normal amount, the
job can't be done with eight or nine
of them; Santa would need 360,000 of
them. This increases the payload, not
counting the sleigh itself, another
54,000 tons, or roughly seven times
the weight of the Queen Elizibeth (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 fasion 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 causing deafening
sonic booms in their wake. The entire
reindeer team would be vaporized within
4.2 thousandths of a second, or right
about the time Santa reaches the fifth
house on his trip. Not that it matters,
however, since Santa, as a result of
accelerating from a dead stop to 650
miles per second in .001 seconds, would
be subjected to centrifugal forces of
17,500 G's. A 250 pound Santa (which
seem ludicrously slim) would be pinned
to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015
pound 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.
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09-13-2002 03:15 AM
