I love this!

I found this and just had to post it, even though it isn't anywhere near Christmas :)

Enjoy!

An Aeronautical Engineer’s Take on Santa Claus (1998)

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 children (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. That is to say, for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has about 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 onto the next house.

Assuming that each one of the 108 million homes 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 that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second – 3,000 times the speed of sound. For comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a porky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer runs at about 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 about 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 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 miles per second in .001 seconds would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g’s. A 250lb Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his 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 ever exist, he’s dead now. Merry Christmas.

I find this truly funny, and apologize if anyone is offended by it.


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