Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective

["John Stricker" <jstricke@domain.elided>]

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
(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 thousandth 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 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.

Now that you know this, have a very Merry Christmas.

John Stricker





jstricke@domain.elided 

"I didn't spend all these years getting to the top of the food chain
just to become a vegetarian"