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Santa's trip, from an engineer's perspective.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts, facts can obscure the truth.(Maya Angelou)
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Santa's trip, from an engineer's perspective.

Postby steveizy » Sat Dec 25, 2010 3:11 pm

I came across this in a newsgroup and I have to say that it has spoilt my Christmas :cry: :cry:

.....

There are approximately two thousand million 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 that 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 he travels
east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per
second.

Therefore, 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 mere 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at
best) 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 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). 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 team of reindeer would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths
of a second, or at about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his
trip. Not that it would matter 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 17,500 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 ever did exist, he's dead now :( :( .

(Unashamedly copied from a post in uk.radio amateur)

Happy Christmas to all,

Steve

Merry Christmas
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Re: Santa's trip, from an engineer's perspective.

Postby dub » Sat Dec 25, 2010 3:31 pm

well the engineer didn't take into account that it's 'magic for one night' (lyric form dan d uncle harry s Christmas )
viewtopic.php?t=341

and by its very nature magic is magical therefore cancels out any scientific equation.
Its ruined my crimbo thinking that the whole experiment failed and santa is a pile of goo
I wondered why as a child I only got a small box of lego each xmas
Puts a whole new meaning to santa leaving a sackful under your tree :lol:
Merry Christmas m8
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Re: Santa's trip, from an engineer's perspective.

Postby steveizy » Sat Dec 25, 2010 4:31 pm

dub wrote:well the engineer didn't take into account that it's 'magic for one night' (lyric form dan d uncle harry s Christmas )
viewtopic.php?t=341

and by its very nature magic is magical therefore cancels out any scientific equation.
Its ruined my crimbo thinking that the whole experiment failed and santa is a pile of goo
I wondered why as a child I only got a small box of lego each xmas
Puts a whole new meaning to santa leaving a sackful under your tree :lol:
Merry Christmas m8


A small box of lego each xmas - Luxury

We 'ad to do with a manky orange and some nuts left in a smelly old laddered stocking.

Times were 'ard, but we was 'appy.
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Re: Santa's trip, from an engineer's perspective.

Postby zuluhotel » Tue Jan 11, 2011 6:34 pm

:lol: :lol: :lol:


Last bumped by zuluhotel on Tue Jan 11, 2011 6:34 pm.
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