AN ENGINEERING PERSPECTIVE ON CHRISTMAS

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, 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 around 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 thousand 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 adsorb 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. None of this matters, however, since Santa, as a result of
accelerating from a dead stop to 650 mps in .001 seconds, would be
subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000g'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 furry goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

This was given to me by an engineer and thought it would be nice to add a little humor to the blogs to tie up this little mini-series.