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 1/1000 th 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 thousands tons, 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). 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 reentering 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) 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
Ho! Ho! Ho!
However, this might have turned out different if Santa had elected to use a
red TR6!
Brian Lanoway
73 red TR6
Winnipeg (and that's close to the North Pole), Canada
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