Santa Claus:An Engineers Perspective

I learned this here

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 house hold, 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.

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.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

 

Ahh, but you see, ZombieSquirrel, Santa Claus isn't a normal person.

You see, SuperSanta is faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! ("Look! Up in the sky!" "It's a bird!" "It's a plane!" "It's Santa Claus!")... Yes, it's Santa Claus... strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men! Santa Claus ... who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands, and who, disguised as Scott Calvin, mild-mannered toy-maker for a great metropolitan toy company, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the distribution of toys to all good little girls and boys!

(btw, DON'T do a GIS for "muscular santa")

 

This was an awesome analysis ... so well done. Got me laughing out loud

Even my ignoring the warning about NOT googling "muscular Santa" could not diminish my enjoyment.

Speaking of which, I was in my local Mall on Friday. I had just left Debenhams with my new toaster, and there I was in the main hall where there was an elven grotto with Santa and Two elves.
I wish I had my camera and digital recorder. Santa was not Muscular .... he was corpulent, purple, the cotton wool beard barely masking the bloodshot hatred in his eyes as he snarled and spat about 'fucking Christmas spirit' to his elves ... women in their early twenties ... one of whom was crying and the other of whom was telling him to 'mind your fucking attitude when there's fucking children present, 'kay? 'KAY?'

I hope they won't be the same people who'll play in the staged Crib Scene this coming Friday and Saturday.

 

Engineering cannot explain MAGIC!

 

On the other hand, he only delivers presents to "good" children, and if my experience at Wal-Mart the other day is indicative of kids in general, Santa's load is lightened by several orders of magnitude.