An Engineer's take on Santa

[jkrohn]

"An Engineer's take on Santa"

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 1 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 round 1/1000th 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 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 thousands 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 reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would each absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second. 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 miles per second, 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. Merry Christmas!!

Jkrohn

[Epidemic]

The one thing not accounted for is the simple fact that miracles happen. Or do you dispute that god took nothing and created a universe?

magic can make anything happen. It is obvious that santa warps space time with his trip and that his reindeer merely walk from roof to roof all ajoined through the time space warp. The number of houses visited are easily traversed in that santa does not exist in time as we know it.

Leave it to an engineer to fail to prove what he wanted to.

Besides he also fails to account for the fact that under each tree there are presents. Sooooo stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Mr maaaan.

As for being turned in to goo in a 17000 g acceleration. that is stupid as well because of the inertial dampeners

[phenious]

Originally posted by jkrohn
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. Merry Christmas!!

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.....

crazy

-: phenious :-

[Redwolf]

LOL. I always see this about christmastime. Like 'Christmas Vacation', it's always funny

[gjimene2]

hahahahahaha,, to funny man, I'm emailing that one

[Knothead]

Jkrohn, yer a Grinch!



yup, I done "grinched" him, yep, I did...

[originel]

that's soooooo freaking hilarious. and it really is an engineer's joke.

Out at Tech we have this thing called carrol of lights every year where they put lights all over the buildings and such, and they have a ceremony and all that jazz, very romantic and such. well leave it to me to attempt to figure out how much power is being used for all the lights.

[JacobM5727]

Originally posted by phenious

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.....

lol

[ILC]

Very funny, however, errors. This is caused by the fact that the amount of time in the air was never factored into the time equation. The assumption of having 1/1000 of a second at each house is only plausible if he would be able to instantaneously transport from house to house. However, if this were the case, he would no longer need his reindeer, and he would not be subjected to the acceleration and heat of flight, as he could move from house to house without movement. It is a shame that this approach completely defies the laws of physics. So in order for Santa to accomplish his marathon he would have to decrease the amount of time at each house, while increasing his maximum velocity, doing so creating more friction -> more heat, and having to pull more G's. The outcome is the same though, disintegration before he finished telling the reindeer to "go".

ILC