Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective
Dec 19th 2010, 10:23 pm
#1
Lowering the tone
Thread Starter
Joined: Mar 2007
Location: Here and there
Posts: 7,351
Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective
This made me smile!
SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
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 children. At a global average rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming of course 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 (2 lb), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 lbs. 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, by another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
IV. 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 stationary to 650 mps. in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500g. A 250lb Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015lbs of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo before he even got to the very first house.
V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. Merry Christmas!
SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
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 children. At a global average rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming of course 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 (2 lb), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 lbs. 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, by another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
IV. 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 stationary to 650 mps. in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500g. A 250lb Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015lbs of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo before he even got to the very first house.
V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. Merry Christmas!
Dec 19th 2010, 10:27 pm
#2
BE Forum Addict
Joined: Sep 2009
Location: Paradise NL
Posts: 1,511
Re: Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective
Cheers for that Jings - Even my kids now think you are an Arab Barsteward 
Dec 19th 2010, 11:57 pm
#3
Lost in BE Cyberspace
Joined: Jul 2006
Location: Cochrane, Alberta
Posts: 7,861
Re: Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective
Seems logical to me - like it 
Dec 20th 2010, 1:18 pm
#4
Thinking the unthinkable.
Joined: Mar 2005
Location: Guelph, Ontario
Posts: 2,136
Re: Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective
It's all done by M...A....G....I....C!
Which neatly sidesteps all the Laws of Physics.
Which neatly sidesteps all the Laws of Physics.
Dec 20th 2010, 10:39 pm
#5
.........................
Joined: Aug 2009
Posts: 1,615
Re: Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective
and I heard a worrying rumour today that he wasn't real..I considered the source (grumpy old man colleague) and dismissed it!
