Engineers Ruin Christmas

Anth · 12-22-2005, 09:30

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the
world. However, since Santa does not usually 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 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 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.

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, and
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 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).
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 reentering 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. 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.