DeTomaso Mailing List: December 98, Message #279

Subject:	An Engineer's Take On 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 that there is at east 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 around 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--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 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 traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
> resistance-this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a
> spacecraft re-enteringthe 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 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 stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
> acceleration dead 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.
> Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
> Merry Christmas!
>
>