An engineer’s view of Santa
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 (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 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 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 1/1000 th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, 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 onto 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 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 can pull 10 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 adsorb 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 17,000 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.
Everyone obviously knows Santa stops time. (:
As surprising as this will be to a lot of people (for several reasons), I agree wholeheartedly with Ms. McPhee here.
First off, this is an absolute treachery to the small girls and boys that believe in Santa Claus. You have no right at all posting this note.
I never believed in Santa Claus, but that doesn’t make any difference. The difference is that some kids do. No matter how much you try to get them to admit it, they won’t like to accept it. For them, Santa exists and you need to let them hold on to their ‘truth’ for a little longer.
Oh please, this wasn’t in any way meant to be malicious. First of all, any child young enough to believe in Mr. Claus wouldn’t have the attention span to work their way through this “paper.” He/she would lose interest given the first statistic. Any one mature enough to understand what is being said here is probably too old to believe in him anyway. Not to mention Robyn and Jeremy here are acting as if this was designed to be definite disproof of the Santa “theory” when it reality it can be found on many JOKE sites.
So please, remove the carrot lodged in your nether region and stop being so stiff.
Hi. Great site
this is just disgusting, wrong and not to mention rude. Who ever writes this probably has never seen a little kid on christmas day opening their presents from Santa Claus, or waking up seeing that the cookies and milk are gone and the carrots they left for the reindeer have been eaten. The Magic of Christmas is why people love it so much, not because of Santa Claus. Real or Fake. Whoever wrote this, must not remember being that little girl or boy who tried all year to be nice, writing letters to Santa and the reindeer, Believing.
I think who ever wrote this Doesn’t even deserve a lump of coal for Christmas this year, including the people who find it funny or entertaining.