Hi Kevin
I was given this by a family member at Christmas and it sounds like you might be able to refute or confirm this slanderous Santa theory.
Disclaimer: We here at the kiwi household in no way condone or agree with the information mentioned below. It is in no way meant to offend engineers of any kind. So keep all flaming Santa support mail to your selves.
'Tis the season...........
SANTA CLAUS: AN ENGINEER'S PERSPECTIVE
1. 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 chuldren per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
2. 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 (wich 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 purpous 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 the purpous 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.
3. 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).
4. 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 reindeer team would absorb 14.3 quintrillion 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 thousandth of a second, or about the same time Santa reached the fifth house on the trip.
Not that 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 fo 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.
We have proof to the contrary, he delivered goods to our house.
Our family wishes you, your family and all the fine people on this thread the very best for the New Year. |
