Pugs, here is an example of good accounting:
SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
I. 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 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.
II. 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. (That's really why it's pointless to stay up and watch for him...)
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.
III. 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).
IV. 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 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 accellerating from a dead stop
to 650 m.p.s. in .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.
V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
As a side note, the engineers forgot to factor in Santa's ability to by pass
the time space continuum.
In short, Santa is alive and well; engineers are a myth!
Happy Holidays..DD |
