Santa Claus: An Engineers Perspective

[prop-frags]

Thought all DIYers might get a chuckle:

SANTA CLAUS: AN ENGINEER'S PERSPECTIVE

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, which 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. 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 manmade 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.

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 reentering 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 meters-per-second in 0.001 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.

Based on this... ah well, Merry Christmas everyone!

[Herbert T. Kornfeld]

Ah, silly fool! Havent you ever noticed how similar elves and vulcan's from Star Trek look? Thats because the Elves use the teleporter to 'shoot santa down every chimney' in a cloud of electrons, and the energy that the elves store up in their 'great north warp reactor' allows them to use temporal manipulation to make Santa visit every house around the world on an overlapping schedule...of course, to him, it takes all year and then some just to get the trips done, but for us, it takes just one night.

Ever consider how much Santa would make if he worked for UPS as a driver? I mean, those guys make a good amount... something like $70,000. So if you were to make the ratio of how many packages Santa delivers per year compared to a normal UPS driver, and multiply the UPS salary by that, Santa would be the richest man ever.

This is good because he needs it to pay for all that warp reactor material...its not easy making all that energy.

...time for me to put down the nog it seems...

[BrentN]

Almost makes me think Santa isn't real...

[overflowin]

with all the research, calculations and logistics prep he would have to do, on top of the actual trip, i bet mrs. claus feels very neglected...

donnie

[lscaquarium]

geez, we can even make Christmas sound like the biggest geek-fest on the planet.

nice work,lol

kudos,

Chris

[BtheReef]

Very funny!

I like your asides in there as well. Seeing as how your an engineer, maybe you can help me. I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to install christmas tree lights on my Kenya tree.

Thanks.

[818]

prop-frags were you bored when u wrote this??

Haha man... Thats to much thinking

[kabal2]

prop-frags for your info in a show i saw a few years ago, i know santa will have to travel at speeds of 25 times the speed of light, so lets said he weights 300lbs, at that speed, the G forces will be damn high but lets said just 75000Gs at that speed so he will feel around 22,500,000lbs, with that amound of pressure hmmm he will have to be a strong dude. and the presents saying that they weight around 2.5lbs each one, if earth have 108millions like you said that will be around 450.000.000lbs, and that weight at 75.000Gs will be around 33.750.000.000.000 lbs , just think about how big will have to be the reindeer





MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERY ONE

Gabriel

[AnnArborBuck]

In Russia they don't celebrate Christmas till January 8th, so santa wouldn't have to move quite so fast.

[Herbert T. Kornfeld]

Thats true...not everyone gets their presents ON Christmas. And some people dont have chimneys...and some kids are naughty...MOST it seems...so that lightens the load.

So, anyone ever done the calculations for the tooth fairy?

Either way, I still bet its enough G-forces to flatten a penny into copper paper.

[8BALL_99]

Shesh guys dont you know the mall santa's help him out. The reindeer are just for show! All the work is done by the mall santa's in their pintos and neons..

But I have to admit when I read the part about the reindeer bursting into flames I just started laughing my butt off not sure why ..Goodstuff

[Herbert T. Kornfeld]

You mean to tell me that drunk down at the local mall is who comes down my chimney in a few days?!?!! No wonder I woke up and found my wallet a little lighter last year. And that explains the broken bottles...lol.

[em21701]

I think we are all forgetting that Einstein theorized that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down....so therefore while to us Santa had only 1/1000 of a second to stop at each house, from his perspective he had quite a lot of time to savor his milk and cookies.

[Herbert T. Kornfeld]

I dont think he's even close to the speed of light however...

[ggenz]

We may have to watch out, someone might say we have too much time on our hands, and we KNOW thats not true.

[G-man17]

It's ok if Santa starts burning. You see, at 108 million homes and 2oz. of cookies at each home, he has eaten 13.5 million pounds of cookies and can afford to lose the weight

[kbmdale]

Well if he is that fast I imagine it will only take him .000000003 of a second to pound you into submission on the way out the door.....lol.....Merry Christmas all, Santa has technology now and uses DHL to help out...lol

[ChickenCannoneer]

i think that someone here has way too much time on their hands *cough prop-frags*

[Homebrew]

Originally posted by prop-frags
... presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

Too funny prop-frags! I agree with Kornfeld... one good kid in each home is a big stretch! But then again, I have also noticed that the number (and $ value) of gifts from Santa oddly enough seems directly proportional to the kid's brattiness, so I guess he does visit all the naughty kids too. Hmmmm.

[Therbligs]

The deceleration of all that mass on the first stop would rip the sled and Santa apart assuming the acceleration issue was overcame. It’s like trying to stop a comet in a fraction of a second.

Santa won't burn-up, because of his red suit.

[DrBDC]

You all are forgetting the "majic" of Christmas.

[Worldwithin]

I find it interesting that no one has even brought up the suction of the sleigh that would be created if it was traveling that fast. Kinda like when a big truck passes you at a faster speed. Imagine what would happen to everything along the path of an object that size traveling that fast!!!

Now I get it... Santa and his sleigh created the big bang theory.. This universe was created from an alternate universe's Christmas. Santa went so fast that year that it collapsed a portion of that universe and spread it out to where we are..

I knew Santa was real!!!

[Siffy]

Why stop at the engineer's perspective? Looking at Santa from a theoretical physics perspective rather than an applied one makes so much more sense.

Of course there's "majik" in Christmas and Santa Claus. The applied engineer's perspective only explains why Rudolph's nose is red... All those joules of drag are collected there, thus preventing that bursting into flames effect. Or one could assume his nose is a singularity capable of altering space and time.

But take the quantum mechanics look at Santa and you'll notice every year for just one night he exists in many homes at the same time in multiple alternate universes. Our own private universe each holds its own version and existance of Santa. The magic of heart and spirit.

Merry Christmas,
Will

[pad]

hmmm, interesting. I always thought that elves were pioneers in the field of Cloneing. And they have been producing Santas at a rate proportionate to the increase in children pop density. Someone with better math skills may be able to calculate the number of Santas there actually are in existance now.