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by Daniella Burr, Debbie Dadey, Marcia Thornton Jones (Contributor), John
Steven Gurney (Illustrator)
Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the
world. However, since Santa typically may 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 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 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 reducing him to a quivering blob of resilient goo.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
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