SANTA CLAUS-An Engineer's Perspective

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1. 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 478 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... 2. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotatio 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 sliegh, 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 sliegh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these each 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 sliegh 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 a pokey 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best)15 miles per hour. 3. The payload of the sliegh adds another interesting element.Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium size Lego set(two pounds), the sliegh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventinal 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 sliegh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth(the ship, not the monarch). 4. 6000,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance-this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earths 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 4.23 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 miles per second in .001 seconds would be subjected to centrifical forces of 17,500g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sliegh at 4,315.015 pounds of force, instantly crushing him.....Therefore, if Santa did exist.he's dead now. MERRY CHRISTMAS ......RADAR

-- Robert (snuffy@1st.net), December 11, 2001

Answers

Sounds like my Mom when she takes off at a stop light!

-- Jo (mamamia2kids@msn.com), December 11, 2001.

I was with you til you killed off Santa. How very sad.

-- melinda (speciallady104@hotmail.com), December 12, 2001.

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