Any of you asking for bike stuff from Santa Claus might do well to read this. I didn't check the
calculations, but I'm sure it wouldn't change the final result:
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 just 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 at there is at least one good child in each.
2: Santa has 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
3.7 visits per second. This is to say, for every Christian household with a good child, Santa has
around 1/1000 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 purpose of our calculations). We are talking about 1.25 Km per
household, a total of 120.8 million Km, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's
sleigh is moving at 1040 Km 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 43.8 Km per
second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 25 Km per hour.
4: The pay load of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets
nothing more than a medium 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).
5: 600,000 tons traveling at 1040 Km per second creates enormous air resistance....this would heat
up the lead reindeer in the same fashion as a space shuttle 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 1040 k
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.
6: Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
--
Dave Kerber Fight spam: remove the ns_ from the return address before replying!
REAL programmers write self-modifying code.