From: Burt Kessler (bcomet@pacbell.net)
Date: Wed Dec 22 2004 - 08:33:48 PST
Message-Id: <41A02F20-5437-11D9-B5F8-000A95AFE37C@pacbell.net> From: Burt Kessler <bcomet@pacbell.net> Subject: A diversion: Is Santa Alive or Dead? Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 08:33:48 -0800
> Is Santa Alive or Dead?
>
>
>
> I. 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 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 house hold, that comes
> to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child
> in each.
>
>
>
> II. 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 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.
>
>
>
> III. 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).
>
>
>
> IV. 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 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
> centrifugal 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 did exist, he's dead now.
>
>
>
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year
of conversation .-Plato
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