- An Engineer's Christmas
- Author/Engineer Unknown
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- 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.
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- 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 1/1000th 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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).
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- 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-entering 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.
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- 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.
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- Have a Merry Christmas!
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- Jim Mortellaro
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