Holiday Humor: Enjoy
Dec. 19th, 2002 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vervain13Santa Claus: An Engineer’s Perspective
1. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim children, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to about 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.
2. Santa has 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 every Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000 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 out for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh, and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of those 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the world (which of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose of our calculations), we are talking about 1.25 Km per household…a total of 120.8 million Km, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 1040 Km per second…300 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, the fastest human made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 43.8 Km per second and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 25 Km per hour.
3. The pay load of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 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 pay load, 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).
Planning for 11,160,000 reindeer-hours of shit is another smelly problem.
4. 600,000 tons traveling at 1040 Km per second creates enormous air resistance. This would heat up the lead reindeer in the same fashion as a space shuttle 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 creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousands 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 1040 Kps in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal 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.
5. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.
Merry Christmas
1. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim children, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to about 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.
2. Santa has 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 every Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000 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 out for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh, and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of those 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the world (which of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose of our calculations), we are talking about 1.25 Km per household…a total of 120.8 million Km, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 1040 Km per second…300 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, the fastest human made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 43.8 Km per second and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 25 Km per hour.
3. The pay load of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 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 pay load, 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).
Planning for 11,160,000 reindeer-hours of shit is another smelly problem.
4. 600,000 tons traveling at 1040 Km per second creates enormous air resistance. This would heat up the lead reindeer in the same fashion as a space shuttle 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 creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousands 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 1040 Kps in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal 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.
5. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.
Merry Christmas
