SANTA CLAUS: AN ENGINEER'S PERSPECTIVE
To all the engineers
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 that 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 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.
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 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).
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 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 vaporised 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 17,500 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.
Merry Christmas.
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