X-Message-Number: 8952
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 1997 22:28:43 -0800 (PST)
From: Doug Skrecky <>
Subject: SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective

(Not much to do with cryonics, but I hope this will
     provide a little holiday cheer.)

1.  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
 household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at
 least one good child in each.

  2. 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.

  3.      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).

  4.  600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second crates 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 centrifugal forces
of 17,500 g's. A 250  pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be
 pinnedto 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 goo.

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

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